Stanton Marlan

"An important contribution to the understanding of alchemical psychology, this book draws upon a postmodern sensibility to develop an original understanding of the black sun. It offers insight into modernity, the act of imagination, and the work of analysis in understanding depression, trauma, and transformation of the soul. Marlan's original reflections help us to explore the unknown darkness conventionally called the Self."--BOOK JACKET.

The Alchemy and Art of Darkness

The Black Sun

Laura Mei

The term 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘰 is usually thought of as a beginning process in alchemy, roughly equivalent to a descent into the unconscious. In the face of this darkness and the suffering that sometimes accompanies it, there is a natural tendency to turn away from the psyche. While this defensive process is at times necessary, it may also inhibit or bypass a hidden potential in the darkness itself.

In C. G. Jung Speaking, Jung describes the alchemical process as "difficult and strewn with obstacles; the alchemical opus is dangerous. Right at the beginning you meet the 'dragon,' the chthonic spirit, or, as the alchemists called it, the 'blackness,' the nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering". He goes on to say that in "psychological terms, the soul finds itself in the throes of melancholy locked in a struggle with the shadow."

Fantasies are often maintained emotionally in otherwise intellectually sophisticated and developed people. Unconsciously held ideas might include sentiments such as "Life should be fair," "Bad things won't happen to me because I have lived according to this or that principle," 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. 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 innocence of 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 is a dying of immature innocence — a nigredo that holds a transformative possibility and an experience that opens the dark eye of the soul. 

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, conscious, 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.

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.

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. 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. When the link to the Earth is not honored, grounding may emerge unconsciously and harshly.

When the psyche loses its natural rhythm and fixates into complexes, the unconscious becomes destructive.

[Donald] Kalsched describes a split between the vulnerable and shamefully hidden remainder of the "whole Self," often portrayed as a child or animal, and "a powerful, benevolent or malevolent great being" who protects the innocent being. The daemons of the inner world, like the temple lions at the entrance of sacred spaces, serve to keep away the unprepared. They will "disperse fragments, or encapsulate it and sooth it with fantasy, or numb it with intoxicating substances, or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world." Hope would open the soul, leaving it vulnerable to what is imagined as an even more painful experience than that which the "protective daemon" enforces on the wounded "personal spirit."

The Black Sun The Alchemy and Art of Darkness

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