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

The black sun is a paradox. It is blacker than black, but it also shines with a dark luminescence that opens the way to some of the most numinous aspects of psychic life.

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

Life as a long agony on the road to death is nothing but another manifestation of life's demoniacal dialectics, in which forms are given birth only to be destroyed ...

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

"There are as many ways to be lost in the light as in the dark," says storyteller and poet Madronna Holden, who recognizes the peril that occurs when light loses touch with the principle of darkness.' On the cultural level we all too often have become lost in our spiritual, Apollonian, patriarchal, male perspective. Our roots in European

it is in the world of depth psychology "where today we find the initiatory mystery, the long journey of psychic learning, ancestor worship, the encounter with demons and shadows, the suffering of Hell.""

For a number of philosophers-Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others-there is a dangerous tendency in modernity toward closure and tautological reductionism: "totalization, normalization and domination."" Levin has noted that behind our Western visionary tradition lies the shadow of phallocentrism, logocentrism, and a "helio-po

Here, creativity, the flowering philosophical tree, is linked to wounding and the mortificatio. It would appear that what is essential to the creative flowering of the psyche is a wounding and a death of the old self, out of which emerges the new life. In this male version of the process, the tree emerges as a phallus.