"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"

Janet Towbin, who did a series of black paintings influenced by alchemists, writes:is the beginning of consciousness-you cannot have light without darkness or darkness without light. The dyad of black and white sets up a diurnal rhythm and the contrast is essential to consciousness. This is the symbol of Tao, the yin and yang.In alchemy, the color

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

alchemy has placed the death experience at the heart of the alchemical process. Without entering into the nigredo and undergoing the mortificatio experience, no transformation is possible.

Jung traces the idea of the filius-the child of the marriage of opposites-to the archetypal image of the Primordial Man of Light, a vision of the Self that is both light and dark, male and female. Jung findsamplification for figure 4.2 in the mythic figures of Prajapati or Purasha in India, in Gayomort in Persia-a youth of dazzling whiteness like

The lumen naturae is an image of light at the core of ancient alchemical ideas. One of the aims of alchemy was to beget this light hidden in nature, a light very different from the Western association of light as separate from darkness. In Alchemical Studies, Jung writes about the light of nature (lumen naturae), which he calls "the light of

Such images reflect an archetypal moment when we stand on the threshold of our individuation and wonder whether going forward is going to lead to our demise.

My contention is that darkness historically has not been treated hospitably and that it has remained in the unconscious and become a metaphor for it. It has been seen primarily in its negative aspect and as a secondary phenomenon, itself constituting a shadow-something to integrate, to move through and beyond. In so doing, its intrinsic importance

Jung also finds in this image of blackness a nonmanifest latency, a shadow of the sun, as well as an Other Sun, linked to both Saturn and Yahweh, the