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

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

A similar hole in the solar plexus appears in this Alaskan Inuit image of the body (figure 4.14) of a shaman, or tutelary deity. The idea is that, in religious life, the body is opened up, broken down, and transformed. In terms of Inuit mythology, if we maintain a respectful religious attitude toward our suffering as the price of transformation, th

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

Harry Crosby was not the only poet to struggle with Sol niger. In her work titled The Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy, Julia Kristeva, a French linguist and Lacanian psychoanalyst, writes about the poet Gerard de Nerval and his poem "El Desdichado," or "The Disinherited" (1859).

In figure 3.5 we see an image of conjunction in which a black sun is contained in an alchemical vessel.

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.

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

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

Jungian analyst David Rosen's work Transforming Depression contributes to our understanding of such a death process. In that book Rosen coins the term "egocide" to describe the symbolic death necessary to the transformative process, a process in which the psyche is pushed beyond its defenses. He states that symbolic death "leads to a