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

Hillman warns that the nigredo "speaks with the voice of the raven, foretelling dire happenings,"' and Dante tells us, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

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 cold light of the black sun, we understand what Conrad calls the "heart of darkness" and the horror of the "cry" so vividly portrayed by Eduard Munch and the alchemists.

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.

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 cure for suffering-which is the collision of consciousness with unconsciousness-is not to be submerged in unconsciousness, but to be raised to consciousness and to suffer more. The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering. Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for when you sleep and no longer

The sun has blackened, and we have met Jung's Dragon. Our dark eye is opened, and we have entered Edinger's "gate of blackness."

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

In that process, ego identity dies or is symbolically killed along with one's former perspectives of oneself andof life. Still, for Rosen, what Jung calls the Self is not destroyed. What is killed or analyzed to death is the negative (destructive) ego or false (inauthentic) Self. The primary Self as an archetypal image of the Supreme Being remains