The Light of Darkness Itself. Stanton Marlan - The Black Sun

[Luxibis]

Chapter 4

Lumen Naturae

The Light of Darkness Itself

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 darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends.

Therefore it turns blackness into brightness, burns away ‘all superfluities,’ and leaves behind nothing but ‘faecem et scoriam et terram damnatam’ (dross and scoriae and the rejected earth).”  The process of burning away the inessential was part of the alchemical phenomenology of fire intended to bring about a purification.

The alchemists called the process calcinatio. Edinger dedicates a chapter of Anatomy of the Psyche to this procedure.

One aspect of this process is “cremation,” which brings about both the “death and blackness of mortificatio,” as well as drying and “whitening” of the matter undergoing the process. The alchemists refer to this process as the albedo.

Figure 4.1. Kali, seventeenth century. From Ajit Mookerjee, The Feminine Force, p. 64.

Abraham notes that “The clear moonlight of the albedo leads the adept out of the black night of the soul (the nigredo).”3 The alchemical procedure calcinatio has its parallel in Tantric rites, in which Kali is worshipped at cemeteries. The goddess copulates with her consort, Siva, on the body of a corpse, which is burning in a funeral pyre. These rites symbolically and ritually depict death, out of which a new spiritual “human being arises shining.” Kali’s blackness is said to shine, and in figure 4.1 we see the Kali figure, who reduces the universe to ashes, the darkness just before the “bright” phase of a reconstituted self.

I believe the idea of the shining that we see here parallels the alchemical idea of the whitening and silvering. In alchemy, certain passages of text also emphasize a shining or glowing blackness.

In one, the black matter is called “the Ethiopian.” A text by fifteenth-century alchemist and astrologer Melchior says, “Then will appear in the bottom of the vessel the mighty Ethiopian. . . . He asks to be buried, to be sprinkled with his own moisture and slowly calcined till he shall rise in glowing form from the fierce fire.” As noted, alchemical texts have traditionally spoken of this kind of renewal as a transition from the blackness of the nigredo to the whiteness of the albedo, but I believe we have to be careful not to interpret this white outcome of the alchemical process in terms of literal color since there is a tendency in modern culture to see white and black as opposites. The whiteness of the albedo is simultaneously a developmental step in a series of alchemical processes and the illuminating quality intrinsic in the blackness of the nigredo process.

The whiteness that the alchemists speak of is not a whiteness separate from blackness. On the contrary, to understand the “renewal” that “follows” the nigredo, one must go beyond simple dichotomies and see into the complexity of the blackness itself. “‘Putrefaction extends and continues even unto whiteness,’ says Figulus.”

Hillman notes that the “shadow is not washed away and gone but is built into the psyche’s body,” which then exhibits its own kind of lustration and contains both darkness and “light.” It was a light Jung came to know in his alchemical studies. In an Arabic treatise (1541) attributed to Hermes, the Tractatus Aureus, Mercurius says: “I beget the light, but the darkness too is of my nature.” In alchemy, light and dark and male and female are joined together in the idea of the chemical marriage, and from the marriage (of light and dark) the filius philosophorum emerges, and a new light is born: “They embrace and the new light is begotten of them, which is like no other light in the whole world.”

This light is a central mystery of alchemy. 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 finds 

Figure 4.2. The alchemist and the lumen naturae, 1721. From Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art, p. 8.

amplification for figure 4.2 in the mythic figures of Prajapati or Purasha in India, in Gayomort in Persia—a youth of dazzling whiteness like Mercurius—and in Metatron, who in the kabbalistic text of the Zohar was created together with light. Paracelsus also describes the Man of Light, whose illumination is the result of the integration of opposites, as identical with the “astral” man.

The astral, or primordial, man also expresses our own archetypal possibility for illumination and wisdom: “The true man is the star in us. The star desires to drive men towards great wisdom.”

It is interesting to see Derrida’s reading of solar mythology and the problematics of illumination resonating with Jung’s thoughts about the primordial man; both struggle with primary dichotomies and are concerned with going beyond the literal nature of light to a more intrinsic understanding. Derrida’s reading of solar mythology is more complex.

He agrees with Jung that light should not be simply equated with the light of the sun but also linked to the light of enlightenment. Derrida also alludes to a metaphorical Sun that is associated with alternatives to the light of empiricist and other specular conceptions. He speaks of a light that is a “night light [which is a] supplement to daylight.”

In his commentary on Derrida, Martin Jay notes: “The sun is also a star, after all, like all the other stars that appear only at night and are invisible during the day. As such it suggests a source of truth or properness that was not available to the eye, at least at certain times.” 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.” Following Bachelard and intimating a philosophical awareness of Sol niger, Derrida also states that the heart of light is black. Plato’s Sun “not only enlighten[s], it engenders. The good is the father of the visible sun which provides living beings with ‘creation, growth and nourishment.’”

Jung, like Derrida, mentions two images of light: the great light and the inner light of nature, an innerness that is also an outerness. This dual vision is characteristic of the Primordial Man, whose light is ultimately the mundus imaginalis. This, according to twentieth-century
French scholar, philosopher, and mystic Henri Corbin, must not be confused with the “imaginary” in our current understanding of the term. The double nature of light is itself an archetypal theme along with the invisibility of the so-called inner light. It is a light that is neither simply subjective nor simply found in the outer world, in phenomena, or in our speech, but it “buildeth shapes in sleep from the power of the word” and can be found in dreams.

The attainment of this light was, for Paracelsus, his deepest and most secret passion. His whole creative yearning belonged to the lumen naturae, a divine spark buried in the darkness. The divine spark was, according to the alchemists, an animating principle, “a natura abscondita (hidden nature) perceived only by the inward man.”

What Paracelsus called the “luminous vehicle,” neo-Platonic philosophers called the “subtle body,” or the soma pneumatikon, a paradoxical term referring to an intermediate realm that “may be said without exaggeration to have been what might be called the very soul of astrology and alchemy.”

This hidden nature is essential in understanding Sol niger.

Stanton Marlan - The Black Sun. The Alchemy and Art of Darkness.pdf

[Mystic Wolf]

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