sol niger

for Hillman, death is also the death of a materialist viewpoint, freeing us for imaginal and poetic life, a life beyond life, and a movement into psychological depth.

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

"tragic art ... deals with the fact that a man is born to die."

Janet Towbin, who did a series of black paintings influenced by alchemists, writes:is the beginning of consciousness-you cannot have light without darkness or darkness without light. The dyad of black and white sets up a diurnal rhythm and the contrast is essential to consciousness. This is the symbol of Tao, the yin and yang.In alchemy, the color

It is the paradox of the nigredo that I have painted-the conjunction of light and dark, growth and decay, mystery and revelation, the unconscious and conscious. These paintings arevisualizations of the void-a black abyss which contains everything and nothing."'

Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness ... Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.-Lao-Tzu

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 d

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

Derrida was aware that there were two suns, the literal sun and the Platonic sun representing the Good. Derrida notes that, for Plato, the Good was a nocturnal source of all light-"the light of light beyond light."