The idea is that the raw solar energy must darken and undergo a mortificatio process that reduces it to its prime matter. Only then can the creative energies produce a purified product. In this image the sperm of gold refers not to the ordinary seminal fluid of man but rather to “a semi-material principle,” or aura seminales, the fertile potentiality that prepares the Sun for the sacred marriage with his counterpart, darkness, which is thought to produce a philosophical child or stone and is nourished by the mercurial blood that flows from the wounding encounter of the Lion and the Sun. The blood—called red mercury—is considered a great solvent. Psychologically, there is nourishment in wounding. When psychological blood flows, it can dissolve hardened defenses. This then can be the beginning of true productivity. In dreams the imagery of blood often connotes moments when real feeling and change are possible. The theme of the wound can also suggest a hidden innocence, which is also a subject of mortification. The green color of the lion, which is referred to as “green gold,” suggests something that is immature, unripe, or innocent, as well as growth and fertility. The alchemist imagined this innocence, sometimes called virgin’s milk, as a primary condition, something without Earth and not yet blackened. Typical virgin-milk fantasies are often maintained emotionally in otherwise intellectually sophisticated and developed people. Unconsciously held ideas might include sentiments such as “Life should be fair,” “God will protect and care for me like a good parent,” “Bad things won’t happen to me because I have lived according to this or that principle,” “I have been good or faithful, eat healthy foods, and exercise,” and so on. When life does not confirm such ideas, the innocent, weak, or immature ego is wounded and often overcome with feelings of hurt, self-pity, oppression, assault, and/or victimization. nocence The injured ego can carry this wounding in many ways. The darkening process can lead to a kind of blindness and dangerous stasis of the soul that then becomes locked in a wound, in hurt or rage, frozen in stone or ice, or fixed in fire. From the alchemical point of view, these innocent attitudes must undergo this mortificatio process—and innocent attitudes await the necessary work of alchemy. Hillman notes that the blackening begins in “scorching, hurting, cursing, rotting the inof soul and corrupting and depressing it into the nigredo, which we recognize by its stench [a mind lost in introspection about] its materialistic causes for what went wrong. Looking for what went wrong is often looking in the wrong place. What is not seen by the wounded soul is that what is happening under the surface and in the blackening process is a dying of immature innocence—a nigredo that holds a transformative possibility and an experience that opens the dark eye of the soul. As Edinger puts it, the soul “enters the gate of blackness. Jung refers to the descent into darkness as nekyia. In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung uses this Greek word to designate a “‘journey to Hades,’ a descent into the land of the dead.”33 Mythically, as is the case throughout Jungian literature, there are many examples of such journeys. Jung mentions Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Dante starts with a statement of the nigredo experience. He writes: Midway upon the journey of our life I found that I was in a dusky wood; For the right path, whence I had strayed, was lost. Ah me! How hard a thing it is to tell The wildness of that rough and savage place, The very thought of which brings back my fear! So bitter was it, death is little more so. Leaden depression of a Benedictine suffering death in a valley of fading stars. Jung also notes the classic Walpurgisnacht in Goethe’s Faust and apocryphal accounts of Christ’s descent into hell. Edinger gives further examples of the nekyia, citing descriptions from the book of Job, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” His own contributions to this theme are in his study of Melville’s Moby Dick, which he subtitles An American Nekyia and which he refers to as an American Faust.35 Additional parallels are cited by Sylvia Perera, who notes the Japanese Izanami, the Greek Kore-Persephone, the Roman Psyche, and the fairy tale heroines who go to Mother Hulda or Baba Yaga. In Descent to the Goddess, her own work, she studies the theme from the perspective of the initiation of women and takes up the Sumerian story of Inanna and Ereshkigal, the Dark Goddess. One could go on citing numerous examples throughout history and across cultures. As Edinger notes, “the theme has no national or racial boundaries. It is found everywhere because it refers to an innate, necessary psychic movement . The nigredo which must take place sooner or later when the conscious ego has exhausted the resources and energies of a given life attitude. The nekyia ultimately leads to the fading of the ego’s light and a death that is captured in “The Hollow Men” by Eliot: This is the dead land This is the cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man’s hand Under the twinkle of a fading star. The image of Eliot’s fading star or loss of light is given graphic representation in figure 1.6, which depicts a man in a “leaden depression” suffering death in a valley of fading stars. In alchemy, the loss of light renders the soul burnt out, dried up, and picked bare, leaving only skeletal remains. This is illustrated in figure 1.7, which Fabricius calls “The fears and horrors of the damned. In the alchemical text Splendor Solis (1582), death is portrayed by a black sun burning down on a desolate landscape . It is this burnt-out place of the soul that we must enter if we are to understand Sol niger and the nigredo process.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here! —Dante, Inferno, Canto 3
What follows is difficult and uncomfortable. Hillman warns that the nigredo “speaks with the voice of the raven, foretelling dire happenings,and Dante tells us, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Yet, in addition to these warnings, I would like to provide some encouragement. The artist Ad Reinhardt pointed out that we have a natural tendency to rush away from such experiences, yet he encouraged us instead to “wait a minute,” to hold fast—because looking into blackness requires a period of adjustment. The reward for staying is available to those who have faith enough to withstand “infinite duration.” Staying with the darkness allows something to happen that escapes us if we are hasty. If we resist our natural tendency to take flight before painful experiences, we can descend into the dark aspects of the unconscious, which is necessary if we are to make contact with what Goethe calls “infinite nature.” Turning toward such darkness requires a willingness to stay with suffering and to make a descent into the unconscious. Goethe’s great work, Faust, was essential to Jung, who once said that “one cannot meditate enough about Faust.” Edinger also remarked that this work is of “major importance for the psychological understanding of modern man.” For Jung, Goethe was in the grip of a descent, an archetypal process, a process also alive and active within him as a living substance, the great dream of the mundus archetypus, the archetypal world. It was Goethe’s main business and essential to his goal of penetrating the dark secrets of the personality. In the opening of Faust, Goethe’s magnum opus, Faust reflects on the nigredo of “night”: I’ve studied now, to my regret, Philosophy, Law, Medicine, and—what is worst—Theology. from end to end with diligence. Yet, here I am, a wretched fool and still no wiser than before. I’ve become master, and Doctor as well, and for nearly ten years I have led my young students a merry chase. up, down, and every which way— and find we can’t have certitude. This is too much for heart to bear! I well may know more than all those dullards, those doctors, teachers, officials and priests, be unbothered by scruples or doubts, and fear neither hell nor its devils— but I get no joy from anything either, know nothing that I think worthwhile, and don’t imagine that what I teach could better mankind or make it godly . . . No dog would want to linger on like this! . . . Alas! I’m still confined to prison Accursed, musty hole of stone to which the sun’s fair light itself dimly penetrates through the painted glass. Restricted by this great mass of books that worms consume, that dust has covered and that up to the ceiling-vault are interspersed with grimy papers . . . And still you wonder why your heart is anxious and your breast constricted, why a pain you cannot account for inhibits your vitality completely! You are surrounded, not by the living world in which God placed mankind, but, amid smoke and mustiness, only by bones of beasts and of the dead . . . Sustained by hope, imagination once soared boldly on her boundless flights; now that our joys are wrecked in time’s abyss, she is content to have a narrow scope. Deep in our heart Care quickly makes her nest, there she engenders secret sorrows and, in that cradle restless, destroys all quiet joy; . . . You empty skull, why bare your teeth at me, unless to say that once, like mine, your addled brain sought buoyant light but, in its eagerness for truth, went wretchedly astray beneath the weight of darkness.6 It is in this condition of the soul, in this cradle of darkness where the Sun’s fair light barely penetrates, that we find Sol niger. My first encounter with the image of the black sun began innocuously enough. It occurred while working with a woman who related the following dream: I am standing on the Earth. I think: “Why should I do this when I can fly?” As I am flying I think I would like to find my spiritual guide. Then I notice, clinging to my waist, a person. I think this may be my guide. I reach behind me and pull the figure to the front so I can look it in the face. It is a young, borderline schizophrenic girl. I know this is not my guide. I put her aside and continue on my journey to the sun. Just before I get there, a wind comes and carries me back to Earth. The journey skyward and Sun-ward is a common, if not universal, theme. James Hillman tells us that “Human life cannot keep from flying. . . . As we breathe air and speak air, so we are bathed in its elemental imagination, necessarily illuminated, resounding, ascending. For him, “aspiration, inspiration, genius is structurally inherent, a pneumatic tension within each soul.” The function of the wing, Plato tells us, is to take what is heavy and raise it up into the regions above, Of all things connected with the body, the wing has the greatest affinity with the divine. Similar themes are confirmed in art, folklore, classical mythology, sculpture, and poetry. The movement up and out seems to have a universal quality. In the Feast of Icarus, Sam Hazo writes: The poet imitates Icarus. He is inspired to dare impossibility even if this means that he might and possibly will fail in the attempt. His fate is to try to find silence’s tongue, to say what is beyond saying, to mint from the air he breathes an alphabet that captivates like music. His victory, if it comes at all, must of necessity be a victory of the instant, a lyric split second of triumph, quick as a kiss. Hazo’s study of Icarus values the necessity of flight—if a soul is to a have a vibrant and creative life. It is important as an analyst to learn how to support such pneumatic and spiritual ascents, to know both the value of the puer spirit, while at the same time being aware of the dangers of inflation. Like a moth drawn to a flame, our Icarian souls are in peril when in our aspirations we forget our bodies on Earth and the call to an integrated life. For analysts, if not for poets, the “quick kiss” must be linked to a more stable relationship to our transcendent possibilities, so that our eyes are also fixed on waxen wings and on the danger of burnt souls and black holes. We have had the benefit of the myths of Phaethon, Ixion, Bellerephon, and Icarus to remind us of the dangerous side of flying too high and too close to the sun, of becoming the prey of Poseidon. The problem for Icarus is not that he wishes to fly (for that is a natural and healthy emanation of our constitutional potential) but that there is an important difference between a grounded bodily imagination and a defensive or naive Gnostic flight that leaves the body and the darkness behind. Analysts on the whole have learned to look at “flight” and “spirit” with Brueghel’s eye rather than that of Ovid. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes “the amazement of a fisherman, a shepherd and a ploughman when they saw Daedalus and Icarus flying through the sky, an event that was interpreted as an epiphany of the gods.”This amazement is illustrated in the Fall of Icarus by Petrus Stevens and Joos de Momper. Pieter Brueghel, on the other hand, in his “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1558, Royal Museum of Brussels), “inverted Ovid’s theme of placing the emphasis on the humble peasants who continue their labor without even a glance at the sky, or at Icarus, the latter reduced to an insignificant figure that had fallen into the sea.”12 For analysts to identify with either one of these perspectives has cyclopean consequences; it is important to look with two eyes, to see through the perspectives of both Ovid and Brueghel with an eye to epiphany and to earth-sea, or we ourselves are lost in one-sidedness. My patient’s desire to leave Earth may well have been spiritually motivated, but, if so, it was also a flight from the pain associated with the image of the borderline schizophrenic girl, a pathologized image of psychological distress. One might imagine the psyche saying to her, “Turn toward this figure of darkness that clings to you. That is your guide.” This turning was not imaginable, and her pneumatic dream ego was driven with a single intent: to go skyward, sunward. Confronting this direction was the wind-spirit which blew her back to Earth and for the moment gently grounded her. In alchemy, it is important that the pneumatic spirit remain in connection to Earth as imaged in Stolcius’s Viridarium Chymicum. In figure 2.3, the high-flying bird is linked to the small, slow-moving creature of the Earth, which keeps the spirit from flying away. When the link to the Earth is not honored, grounding may emerge unconsciously and harshly. I cannot say whether what followed was in any way actually related to the neglect of the dark side of the psyche or was a part of her biological and spiritual destiny, but as our work continued we encountered a most destructive side of the Sol niger image. In an analytic session my patient reported that she felt something ominous in her chest. She described it as a dark ball that had long strands reaching throughout her body. Her inclination was to reach down and pull it up. Between sessions, in an active imagination she drew the image that she felt was lodged in her chest. It was a brilliant sun with a dense black center and long, fibrous tentacles After drawing it, she felt the image was not menacing enough and felt a need to draw it again. She drew a second image, in which the black center had increased in size and the brightness of the yellow was replaced by a red field. The long, black fibers remained, and there were many circular black shapes that my patient described with horror as an explosion of dead, skeletal embryos . It was as if she had brought to the surface a compressed and exploding black sun that seemed to prefigure her ability to verbalize painful memories of her unassimilable distress and the madness of her suicidal feelings. In spite of this retrieval and the process that it initiated, the image, like a devouring demon, did not subside. Shortly afterward, she reported a dream in which she felt a nuclear war was inevitable. While grappling with these images, she suffered an aneurism of the anterior region of her brain and came close to death. She lost sight in one eye but survived. I could not help but feel some connection between the image of the black sun and the medical incident, which almost cost her her life and led to partial blindness. This led me to wonder whether there were any documented incidents of a similar kind. In researching the analytic literature, I came across the case of Robert, published by the Australian analyst Giles Clarke in Harvest (1983). His article is titled “A Black Hole in Psyche.” In it he describes the case of Robert, a twenty-nine-year-old man who was struggling with something that seemed impossible to integrate or explain in terms of conventional, psychodynamic theories. Clarke describes a dream of Robert’s in which there is an image of a black hole into which the whole world disappears. Astronomically, a black hole is a sun or star that has collapsed in on itself, creating a vacuum that sucks all matter into itself, a “scientific vision” of Sol niger. For Clarke, the psychology of the black hole is connected to the failure of psychic life and to something that is an inassimilable and intolerable object of anxiety and dread. He connects it with a kind of chronic, psychic atrophy that can sometimes be literally fatal. Robert’s dream was followed by a series of disturbing images and debilitating physical symptoms. Clarke reports images of a “stillborn baby,” a “mutant or monster birth,” abortions, and a “miscarriage.” Robert “developed migraines, his eyesight suffered, his sense of taste and smell atrophied, and his legs tingled and ached.” Finally Robert became seriously ill and died of cancer. Another encounter with the black sun is found in Ronald Laing’s book The Divided Self, where he speaks of the emergence of the black sun in his treatment of Julie, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. On the one hand, Julie imagined herself to be any one of a large number of famous personalities, but inwardly she had no freedom, autonomy, or power in the “real world.” Since she could be anyone she cared to mention, she was no one. She was “terrified by life. . . . [L]ife would mash her to a pulp, burn her heart with a red hot iron, cut off her legs, hands, tongue, breasts.” Life was conceived in the most violent and fiercely destructive terms imaginable. She stated that she was “born under a black sun,” and the things that lived in her were wild beasts and rats that infested and ruined her inner city. Julie’s imagery is amplified in Von Franz’s description of Sol niger as the destructive side of the Sun god, reminding us that Apollo is the god not only of the Sun but also of mice, rats, and wolves and that the dark side of the Sun is demonic and his rays burn life to death. He is a god without justice and brings death to the living. Laing goes on to note that this ancient and very sinister image of the black sun arose, for Julie, quite independently of any reading; still, she described the way the rays of the black sun scorched and shriveled her, and under the black sun she existed as a dead thing. Her existence then was depicted in images of utterly barren, arid dissolution. This existential death, this death-in-life, was her prevailing mode of being in the world.19 In this death there was no hope, no future, no possibility. Everything had already happened. There was no pleasure, no source of possible satisfaction, for the world was as empty and as dead as she was. In Alchemy, von Franz writes about the shadow side of the Sun as destructive, unjust, and demonic. She refers to that aspect of Sol niger where the Sun is so hot that it destroys all plants. She recalls a story from Indochina that relates that a too-hot sun was shot at dawn by a hero figure linked to Saturn. For von Franz, the shadow of the Sun as “a Sun without justice, which is death for the living,” reflects “a wrongly functioning consciousness” that rejects the dark side of God.18 She states, “If consciousness works according to nature, the blackness is not so black or so destructive, but if the Sun stands still, it is stiffened, and burns life to death.” When the psyche loses its natural rhythm and fixates into complexes, the unconscious becomes destructive.
