The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology Book 10)

For instance, alchemist Edward Kelly, in his paper "The Theatre of Terrestrial Astronomy," comments that "the beginning of our work is the black raven which, like all things that are to grow and receive life, must first putrefy. For putrefaction is a necessary condition of solution, as salvation is of birth and regeneration."46

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 requ

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

Along with the tree, the theme of the whitening birds and the albedo is present, indicating the upward movement of her psychic energy.

"The alchemical operations were real, only this reality was not physical but psychological. Alchemy represents the projection of a drama both cosmic and spiritual in laboratory terms. The opus magnum had two aims: the rescue of the human soul and the salvation ofthe cosmos."'

The starred heaven is then equated by Lopez-Pedraza with the alchemical scintillae, the first appearance of the soul, thesparks of light in the dark sky that for Jung reflected the multiple centers of the psyche in the darkness of the unconscious.

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

"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

The mortificatio process was often thought of as tortuous and as the "most negative operation in alchemy."" "It has to do with darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death and rotting. The process of rotting is called putrefactio, the decomposition that breaks down organic bodies""