The paradox of the black sun is that it is an image that simultaneously expresses what traditionally has been held to be a pair of incompatible and opposing phenomena: darkness and light, blackness and luminosity. Yet, in the image of Sol niger, they are intimately linked.

Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness ... Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.-Lao-Tzu

In that process, ego identity dies or is symbolically killed along with one's former perspectives of oneself andof life. Still, for Rosen, what Jung calls the Self is not destroyed. What is killed or analyzed to death is the negative (destructive) ego or false (inauthentic) Self. The primary Self as an archetypal image of the Supreme Being remains

Another image (figure 3.6) of Sol niger is found in The HermeticGarden of Daniel Stolcius.47 This is an essential, seventeenth-century sourcebook in the symbolic and meditative tradition in alchemy and one of its most important emblem books.411

"the black paintings are icons without iconography. They function like the hypnotic patterns of the abstract diagrams of tantric Buddhism: they induce a state of contemplation which may be defined as meditative.... The black paintings, although not specifically `religious,' are an effort to retrieve the dimension of the spiritual in a secular

When you see your matter going black, rejoice, for this is the beginning of the work.-Rosarium

Does the ego require a dying process, as the themes of myth and alchemy suggest?

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

The nigredo, the initial black stage of the alchemical opus, has been considered the most negative and difficult operation in alchemy.