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

The black sun, blackness, putrefactio, mortificatio, the nigredo, poisoning, torture, killing, decomposition, rotting, and death all form a web of interrelationships that describe a terrifying, if most often provisional, eclipse of consciousness or of our conscious standpoint.

Years later Stephen Little published Taoism and the Arts of China,

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.

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.

The dark side of psychic life is both dangerous and at times tragic, but the acceptance of its tragic potential was for Jung a necessity. He noted that the cure for suffering might well be more suffering.

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 M

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

"If consciousness works according to nature, the blackness is not so black or so destructive, but if the Sun stands still, it is stiffened, and burns life to death"

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