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 requires a

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

How can we understand a death that means new life or a darkness that shines?

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.

In the classical and developmental psychologies, the unity of the healthy ego is the essential structure of the psyche. The question of the dissolution of the ego or Self is almost always seen as regressive and detrimental, a fusion, or a return to the mother. Some analysts, however, have raised a different perspective, one that has challenged ego

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

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 ... greater

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.