James Hillman – The Seduction of Black
The principal of the art is the raven. – C. G. Jung
The Color of Non-Color
Black and White – these two non-colors to the Newtonian eye of science are, to the eye of culture, the first of all colors – the truly primary colors. Two University of California ethnologists published a survey of the words for colors in some ninety-eight languages.
From this base, they made a wider, universal claim, reporting that all languages have terms for black and white, dark and light, obscure and bright.
Furthermore, if a language has a third color term, it will be red; and if a fourth and fifth, yellow or green.
For us, their principal finding, and the one least contested by others, is the primacy of the blackwhite pair.
All cultures, it seems, make this distinction, this fact suggesting the importance of the diurnal rhythm, [2] and, particularly for psychology, that contrast [3] is essential to consciousness.
Among sub-Saharan African peoples, the three primary colors – black, white, and red (and I am translating more metaphorically concrete expressions into our abstract color terms) – form the very ruling principles of the cosmos. They are not merely color words, names of hues.
We find a similar idea in the three gunas in Indian cosmology: black tamas, red rajas, and white sattva enter into the composition of all things.
The anthropologist Victor Turner states that these three colors “provide aprimordial classification of reality.”
They are “experiences common to all mankind,” like archetypal “forces,” “biologically, psychologically, and logically prior to social classifications, moieties, clans, sex totems, and all the rest.”
For culture, black and white, as well as red, precede and determine the way human life is lived.
Turner ’s claim separates the “culture” of color from the “science” of color.
From the cultural viewpoint, colors are not secondary qualities, reducible to physical sensations in neurological systems in the subjective perceiver.
On the one hand, colors have to do with light, reflection, optics, and nerves; on the other, they have something to do with the world itself.
They are the world itself, and this world is not merely a colored world, as if by accidents of light and chemistry, or as if decorated by a painterly god.
Colors present the world’s phenomenal actuality the way the world
shows itself, and, as operational agents in the world, colors are primary formative principles.
Even the rainbow derives its colors from the phenomenal world (rather than from the refraction of light) according to the mediaeval imagination:
“From the heavens it derives the fiery color; from water, the purple; from air, the blue; and from the earth the grassy color.”
Whether the earth takes its colors from an invisible, colorless light above or composes that light by means of its own elemental hues (green grass, blue water), the rainbow joins visible and invisible.
The Torah says God set forth the rainbow as a visible sign that the cosmos is sustained by invisible principles.
The rainbow also declares the double principle that the display of beauty goes hand in hand with discrimination, the spectrum of finely differentiated hues.
Only in a physically reduced worldview, a worldview reduced to and by physics, can black be called a non-color, an absence of color, a deprivation of light.
This privative definition of black ignores the fact that black appears in broad daylight in naturally given pigments and in other phenomena from charcoal and obsidian to blackberries and animal eyes.
Moreover, the negative and primitive definition of black promotes the moralization of the black-white pair. Black, then, is defined as not white and is deprived of all the virtues attributed to white.
The contrast becomes opposition, even contradiction, as if day would be defined as not-night, and a blackberry be defined as a notwhiteberry.
The law of contradiction, when moralized, gives rise to our current Western mindset, beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Age of Light, where God is joined with whiteness and purity, while black, with the privatio boni, becomes ever more strongly the color of evil.
Northern European and American racism may have begun in the moralization of color terms.
Long before any English-speaking adventurer touched the shores of West Africa, fifteenth-century meanings of “black” included: “deeply stained with dirt; soiled; foul; malignant, atrocious, horrible, wicked; disastrous, baneful, sinister … ” When the first English-speaking sailors spied natives on West African shores, they called these people “black.”
That was the first generally descriptive term they used – not naked, not savage, not pagan – but black.
Once named, these native peoples were cursed with all the meanings implied in that term.
The English term “white” to characterize an ethnic group first occurs in 1604, after the perception of Africans as “black.”
The moralization and opposition between white and black continues to this day in general English language usage, as white equals good, and black equals bad, dirty, foul, sinister, and evil. “White” as a term for Christians had become firmly established by 1670 in the American lexicon.
Disdain for black is not only contemporary, Western, and English.
The color black in the Greek world, and in African languages also, carried meanings contrasting with white and red, and included not only the fertility of the earth and the mystery of the underworld, but also disease, suffering, labor, sorcery, and bad luck.
Black, however, is no more cursed than any other color.
In fact, color terms bear extremely contrary meanings.
Each is weighted down with a composite of opposites – yellow with sunshine and decay; green with hope and envy; blue with puritanism and prurience.
The curse of black comes only when color terms are laid onto human beings, a curse of our Anglo-American culture that has burdened the majority culture by labeling it white, thereby loading it with the archetypal curse of white supremacy.
Could there be an archetypal aspect to darkness that might account for our disdain, as well as the fear, the physiological shudder, it can release?
Does the human eye prefer light to darkness? Is the human being heliotropic, fundamentally adapted to light? Is visual perception its preferred sense, as we witness in the embryo where, from its earliest weeks, the rudimentary optical system begins to form before many others?
If the human animal has an innate predilection to light, then the exclusion of black as a color term substituting for “darkness” might find justification.
The exclusion of darkness favors adaptation to the phenomenal world and optimal functioning within it by means of our primary organs of sense, the
eyes.
Then, we might conclude that the definition of black as a non-color belongs to the ocular identity of human consciousness.
The eye becomes the pars pro toto for habitual human consciousness, and black threatens the very core of this identity.
This threat, however, is precisely its virtue!
The Alchemical Nigredo
The cosmic significance of these three primary colors appears as well in early Western science, that is, in the tradition of alchemy.
Of the three, black plays an especially important role as the base of the
work and even enters into the formation of the word “alchemy.”
The root khem refers to Egypt as the black land, or land of black soil, and the art of alchemy was called a “black” art or science.
The Western alchemical tradition traces its source to the techne of Egyptian embalming, dyeing of cloth, jewelry, and cosmetics.
The first four color terms – black, white, red, and yellow – are also the primary color terms embracing the entire alchemical opus: nigredo, albedo, xanthosis or citrinitas, and iosis or rubedo.
These color terms describe: (1) stages of the work; (2) conditions of the material worked on; and (3) states in the psyche of the artifex or worker-alchemist.
Each color term combines three distinct categories which our modern consciousness keeps separate: the method of working, the stuff worked
on, and the condition of the worker.
For our epistemology, there is no inherent or necessary relation among method, problem, and subjectivity.
For example, for any alchemical substance to enter the nigredo phase and blacken, the operations must be dark and are called, in alchemical language, mortificatio, putrefactio, calcinatio. and iteratio.
That is, the modus operandi is slow, repetitive, difficult, desiccating, severe, astringent, effortful, coagulating, and/or pulverizing.
All the while, the worker enters a nigredo state: depressed, confused,
constricted, anguished, and subject to pessimistic, even paranoid, thoughts of sickness, failure, and death.
The alchemical mode of science maintained the law of similitudes among all participants in any activity: the work, the way of working and the worker.
All must conform; whereas in science the subjectivity of the experimenter may be radically separated from the experimental design and from the materials of the experiment.
Alchemical method, by contrast, treats each problem according both to its and the alchemist’s nature.
That is why no comprehensive system can be drawn from alchemical texts; why measurement plays an indifferent role; why the inventions of each alchemist are stridently opposed by other alchemists; and why even the materials worked on are so radically differentiated – so many kinds of
salt, so many names for mercury, so many styles and shapes of instruments.
The radical idiosyncrasy of, and yet deep concordance among, method, problem, and subjectivity also account for why depth psychology finds alchemy so useful a background for the work in its laboratories: the consulting rooms where nigredo conditions are all too familiar.
We may read this conformity among worker, the worked on, and way of working, backwards; such a reading may offer psychological insights that cannot be gained from a Cartesian-Newtonian science that separates worker from the work.
From alchemy, we learn that if you as a worker in any field on
any project – from research to marriage, from business to painting – become exhausted, dried out, stuck, depressed, and confused, then you have indications of a nigredo phase, and the material you are encountering is itself dark and obstinate.
This “depression” signifies neither a failure of your personality nor of your method. In fact, the very difficulties in your method and the darkness of your fantasies indicate that you are in the right place and doing the right thing just because of the darkness.
The optimistic and more Christianized readings of alchemical texts give the nigredo mainly an early place in the work, emphasizing progress away from it to better conditions, when blackness will be overcome and a new day of the albedo will resurrect from obfuscation and despair.
Christianized readings seem unable to avoid salvationalism.
This, however, is only one possible reading.
The texts make very clear that the nigredo is not identical with the materia prima, a much larger basket of conditions.
The nigredo is not the beginning, but an accomplished stage. Black is, in fact, an achievement!
It is a condition of something having been worked upon, as charcoal is the result of fire acting on a naive and natural condition of wood, as black feces are the result of digested blood, as blackened fungus is the result of decay.
Because depression, fixations, obsessions, and a general blackening of mood and vision may first bring a person to therapy, these conditions indicate that the soul is already engaged in its opus.
The
psychological initiation began before therapy’s first hour. Jung says of the nigredo: “It is right that the
magnum opus should begin at this point.”
Black Intentions
What does black intend to achieve? Why is it an accomplishment? Let me briefly list what blackening
performs, without using the mystical language of John of the Cross, Simone Weil, and other
proponents of religious darkness. First, as non-color, black extinguishes the perceptual colored
world.
Second, the blackening negates the “light,” whether that be the light of knowledge, the attachment to
solar consciousness as far-seeing prediction, or the feeling that phenomena can be understood. Black
dissolves meaning and the hope for meaning. We are thus benighted. [9]
Third, the two processes most relevant for producing blackness –putrefaction and mortification –
break down the inner cohesion of any fixed state. Putrefaction, by decomposition or falling apart;
mortification, by grinding down, as seeds in a mortar are refined into ever thinner and smaller
particles. Newton himself wrote:
“[F]or the production of black, the Corpuscles must be less than any
of those which exhibit Colours.” [10]
The thickness and solidity of the materials he worked with,
Newton said, became more attenuated by fire and by putrefaction, “the more subtle dissolver.” Black
matter was the least formed and the most susceptible to dissolution – or in our language, chaos.
This “subtle dissolver,” when mixed into other hues, brings about their darkening and deepening
or, in alchemical psychology’s language, their suffering. Black steers all varieties of brightness into
the shade. Is corruption, then, black’s intention?
An answer depends on what is meant by “shade.” Surely, this intention is not merely the sullying of
innocence, the staining of the only natural, that necessary preliminary to all alchemical thinking.
Hence, we are not dealing merely with the corruption of natural innocence.
The “shade” that black
afflicts pertains to the deeper and invisible realm of shades, the Kingdom of Hades, which is the
ultimate “subtle dissolver” of the luminous world.
We can begin to see – through a glass darkly – why the color black is condemned to be a “noncolor.”
It carries the meanings of the random and the formless. Like a black hole, it sucks into it and
makes vanish the fundamental security structures of Western consciousness. By absenting color, black
prevents phenomena from presenting their virtues. Black’s deconstruction of any positivity –
experienced as doubt, negative thinking, suspicion, undoing, valuelessness – explains why the nigredo
is necessary to every paradigm shift.
Black breaks the paradigm; it dissolves whatever we rely upon as real and dear. Its negative force
deprives consciousness of its dependable and comforting notions of goodness. If knowledge be the
good, then black confuses it with clouds of unknowing; if life be the good, then black stands for
death; if moral virtues be the good, then black means evil.
If nature is conceived as a many-colored
splendor, then black signifies the entire opus contra naturam, translating the great phenomenal world
into the inked abstractions of letters, numbers, and lines, replacing the palpable and visual given with
the data of marks and traces. By deconstructing presence into absence, the nigredo makes possible
psychological change.
The change derives from black’s dissolving effect on all positivities.
“Negation brings fluidity”; [11] psychic energy or libido (whose root means downflowing, like
liquid) moves from its coagulations, seeks new goals.
Therefore, each moment of blackening is a harbinger of alteration, of invisible discovery, and of
dissolution of attachments to whatever has been taken as truth and reality, solid fact, or dogmatic
virtue.
It darkens and sophisticates the eye so that it can see through.
Thus, black often becomes the
color of dress [12] for the underworld, urban sophisticates, and the old who have seen a lot.
Because black breaks the comforting paradigms, it is the color preferred by the spiritually driven
and politically pressuring reformers and “outsiders” – adolescents, rebels, pirates, ladies of the night,
cultists, bikers, Satanists, puritans, anarchists, hitmen, priests – all the “non-conformists” who then
become trapped by their own identification with black.
Though alchemical maxims say that the work must resemble a “raven’s head” in its blackness and
that this raven is “the principle of the art,” these sayings identify the depth of black’s radicality.
They
do not intend radical identity or identification with black. Black is itself not a paradigm, but a
paradigm breaker.
That is why it is placed as a phase within a process of colors, and why it appears
again and again, in life and in work, in order to deconstruct (solve et coagula) what has become an
identity.
Those who wear the black shirt and the black robe, the black hood, and black undergarments
as signs of radical identity become thereby neither anarchists, outsiders, nor reformers, but
fundamentalists. Hence the rigid severity and monotheistic literalism of revolutionaries.
Alchemical psychology teaches us to read as accomplishments the fruitlessly bitter and dry
periods, the melancholies that seem never to end, the wounds that do not heal, the grinding sadistic
mortifications of shame and the putrefactions of love and friendships.
These are beginnings because
they are endings, dissolutions, deconstructions. But they are not the beginning, as a one-time-only
occurrence.
Such would be a literal reading of the alchemical process, which is not a unidirectional
model, progressing in time. It is an iteratio; black repeats in order for the deconstruction to continue,
as shown, for instance, by Figure Nine of Jung’s commentary on the alchemical Rosarium. [13]
The
soul returns, the King and Queen are joined – yet out of the ground emerge the dark birds. Are these
birds “the seduction of black,” drawing the psyche back to the protective comfort of all-too-familiar
complaints, the nest of the status quo ante?
“What you must be particularly careful about … is to
prevent the young ones of the crow from going back to the nest when they have left it.” [14]
I want
neither to condemn you to permanent blackness nor to relieve you from it by promising the return of
the colored world, which alchemical psychology presents in gorgeous images. My aim has been
neither.
Blacker Than Black
I am moved by another intention: to warn. And warning, too, belongs to the nigredo, for it speaks with
the voice of the raven, foretelling dire happenings that may result from the seduction of black.
Remember how nineteenth-century colonials feared going black; how Joseph Conrad perceived a
madness and a horror in the heart of darkness; how the black plague, the black knight, the black shirt,
and the black inquisitor haunt historical Europe; and how the scariest images of childhood, from
chimney sweep, magician, black widow, the Rottweiler and the Doberman, to skeletons in the danse
macabre and the Grim Reaper himself stalk the halls of fantasy – all in black.
To socialize these fears
into race relations does not get at the archetypal imagination of these fears.
Let us be clear:
Negro is not nigredo, although a figure in a dream called “black,” as any dream
phenomenon so named, may usher in, and represent, the blackening. But especially in a racist society,
we must keep very distinct the epithets that arbitrarily color human beings on the one hand, and, on
the other, cosmic forces that shape the soul apart from human beings. What civilized society fears is
black magic: the magical pull of black attraction, the soul’s desire to descend into darkness, like
Persephone unto Hades. [15]
We fear what we most desire and desire what we most fear .
The essence of this fear lies in the black radix itself: that it is implacable, indelible, permanent, a
crucial component of the aqua permanens – that sense of psychic reality underlining and underlying
all other realities, like an awareness of death. Thus, the tragic paradox of black. It sticks like tar [16]
to its own self-same negativity.
As it curses other colors by darkening their brightness, it curses itself
as well, by making itself “blacker than black,” beyond the touch of Mercurius duplex.
In other words, the color required for change deprives itself of change, tending to become ever
more literal, reductive, and severe.
Of all alchemical colors, black is the most densely inflexible and,
therefore, the most oppressive and dangerously literal state of soul. Hence clinicians fear that nigredo
conditions of depression will lead to literal suicide, revenge to violence, and hatred to domestic
cruelty. Hence, too, reductive moves and “shadow” work in therapy feel so concrete and
confining. [17]
Of course, as painters know, there are many saturations of black. Part of the painter ’s opus is the
differentiation of blacks: blacks that recede and absorb, those that dampen and soften, those that etch
and sharpen, and others that shine almost with effulgence – a sol niger. [18] Nonetheless, the
alchemical maxim “blacker than black” states an ultimate radicality beyond all different shades and
varieties.
What is blacker than black is the archetypal essence of darkness [19] itself, at times named
by alchemy as night, Satan, sin, raven, chaos, tenebrositas, black dog, and death …
Since Mercurius is hidden and the albedo, an unpredictable grace, what can “cure” the nigredo?
What can release the soul from its somber identification? This is the question posed in every analysis,
and posed during the nigredo moments of every life.
The alchemist answer: decapitation. According
to Jung, the black spirit is to be beheaded, an act that separates understanding from its identification
with suffering. Because, “in the nigredo the brain turns black,” [20] decapitation “emancipates the
cogitatio.”
Blackness remains, but the distinction between head and body creates a two, while
suffering imprisons in singleness.
The mind may begin to recognize what the body only senses.
Decapitation allows the mind to be freer from the body’s identity.
Of course, decapitation makes sense as an operation only as a treatment for the nigredo. It is, of
course, contraindicated – even redundantly senseless – for those conditions of the soul where the head
is barely attached and rarely recognizes anything the body feels.
And, of course, the alchemical
“body” refers not merely to the physical flesh and its symptoms, but to all imaginal perspectives that
are trapped in habitual concretisms.
Decapitation is therefore a separatio – to use an alchemical term for the basic therapeutic move of
making distinctions, or analyzing. Despite the fixity of nigredo moods and their repetitious thoughts,
analysis separates the material – dreams, moods, projections, symptoms – from the mind’s literal
identification with this material.
The dense and oppressive material becomes images that can be
entertained by the mind. Mental images emancipate us from the slavery to the nigredo; though the
material remains dark, decapitation allows the mind to cogitate the darkness.
Alchemy advises “beware of the physical in the material.” It is not the “material” of suffering that
poisons the work with despair, but the “physical,” that is, the substantive naturalistic mind that
prevents an imaginative appreciation of the material.
Just this imaginative appreciation is what
alchemical psychology offers. Patients, and any of us at many times who are “unable to imagine” are
often trapped in the nigredo by past traumata, and caught by the “physical in the material.”
These same
patients, however, may be trapped as well in the nigredo of their therapists who have not been
decapitated and whose cogitations have not been emancipated from reductive, naturalistic, [21] and
historicist understanding of what’s going on.
Literalism is surely the most obdurate of all our habitual concretiisms. By this “literalism” I mean
singleness of meaning, identification of any concrete embodiment with its “word,” that identity
between word and thing so that words become things.
Decapitation also frees the word “black” from
only nigredo meanings, therewith freeing phenomena (including persons) called “black” from the
indelible fixities of nigredo projections.
Remember here that the “word” in our culture is inked in black, and this selection of color for ink
may be more than merely convenient and efficient. The very blackness of the inked letter supports its
indelible fixity and abets the cursing power of literalism.
Perhaps, then, the contemporary attempts at multiple meanings (poly-semy), of separating the
signifier and the signified, of playing with the ambiguity of “trace,” troping, displacing, and insisting
upon difference and, as well, the absenting of all certitudes from positive propositions, these
deconstructive moves may be French modes of decapitating the cogito – freeing the mind from the
singleness that I condemn as literalism.
The entire French effort may be alchemy-like attempts (the
arcane obscurantism of deconstructive talk sounds indeed like the language of the alchemists) to
invite Mercurius duplex back into the discourse from which French logical clarity had excused him.
Although I can grasp an alchemical intention in contemporary French thought, I do not profess its
method: it stops short and remains an exercise of the cogito.
The guillotine blade never quite cuts
through.
The brain remains blackened, and so the cogitations of its mind are read by critics as
nihilism, Euro-pessimism, cynicism, negative theology, and the latest fashion in existential despair,
and therefore deconstructionism becomes one more habitual concretism of Western thought.
It stops short before the nigredo turns blue. After the black comes the blue – not cynical, but sad;
not hard and smart, but slow. The blues bring the body back with a revisioned feeling, head and body
rejoined. The alchemists spoke of this as the unio mentalis, which I elaborate in Chapter 5 below.
Blue
gives voice to the nigredo, and voice unites head and body. Darkness imagined as an invisible light,
like a blue shadow behind and within all things.
The principal concretism against which this present chapter has been contending is the Newtonian
convention, upheld by the dictionary, [22] that excludes black from the realm of color because it is not
concretely visible in the spectrum. Perhaps, however, the fault is not Newton’s at all but results from
black’s cursed literalism, its desire to be outside this world, in the underworld of invisibilities, or in
the dark kingdom of death.
Perhaps black cannot lift the curse from off its own head, so that it
becomes our job, each of ours, to decapitate the nigredo, to emancipate our minds in a post-
Newtonian manner.
Sol niger dispels the nigredo curse because it is “blacker than black.” As Stanton Marlan shows, [23]
we may be blackened and yet enlightened. Sol niger – one name for the ultimate aim of the whole
alchemical endeavor – blackens with “unassimilable” darkness.
I
t feels to be an “intolerable
image.” [24]
Yet it is an image of sol, an illuminating sun that may darken all day-world positivism,
but not all insight.
As negation of negation, the black sun ontologically eradicates the primordial
dread of non-being, that unfullfillable abyss – or, the abyss becomes the unbounded ground of
possibility.
Negation conceived as theological evil, a stage in a dialectical process, or a Manichaean power
gives a positive function to darkness, enhancing the seduction of black. We succumb to the reverse of
solar optimism, and descend into a positivist negation revealed as “the horror, the horror,” into
pessimism, cynicism, despair, and suicide as a rationally valid answer to a nigredo view.
But sol niger
shines invisibly through every such negative coagulation. Darkness and translucence both, a true
decapitation of the ordinary mind. Hence Philalethes can speak of “eternal death that gladdens the
heart.”
This emancipation of the mind means more than thinking dark thoughts with a blackened brain or
suffering the body’s obstinate depressions. It means the incorporation of invisibility within all
perceptions, never losing the dark eye or ignoring the soul’s desire for shades and sorrows. Hades
never far from brother Zeus.
To be benighted is only the beginning; to be black, to see black – that’s
how the nigredo inescapably affects us. But, to see by means of black, to see the habitual as mystery,
the apparent as ambiguous, shifts the concretistic fixities into metaphorical images.
This is the
emancipation of the nigredo from literalism. Like cures like; we cure the nigredo by becoming, as the
texts say, blacker than black – archetypally black, and thereby no longer colored by all-too-human
prejudices of color.
Becoming blacker than black would also bear upon the chaos and tragedy of what are misnamed
“race” relations and are more truly color relations because they are reflections in the human sphere
of alchemical processes whose intentions only peripherally concern people.
For the desire of
alchemy was not merely toward the human soul; it sought the soul of the world.
Alchemy is a
cosmological work; to follow an alchemical psychology at once leads to working with the world.
Alchemy would re-animate the dense and neglected, sometimes called “matter,” and alchemy demands
an ever-returning descent into that darkness, that invisibility sometimes called Hades.
By continuing to regard black as a non-color and segregating it from the bright beauty of the
Newtonian prism, our faulty cosmology remains unable to find a place for the nigredo, except as
“shadow” phenomena such as crime, cruelty, racism, imprisonment, toxicity, and the mental disorder
of depression.
Also, our science-infected psychology, by locating nigredo phenomena only in
subjectivity as human moods and human failures, continues its delusional method that disconnects the
work from the worker and from the ecological world worked on.
Worse is the danger that our Western epistemology loses its ability to correct its own bright
blindnesses by making radical paradigm shifts.
The conversion of black from non-color to color,
from negative to negation of negation, is therefore not merely an issue of societal reform regarding
the inclusion of darker peoples and darker shades of existence.
The inclusion of black among the
colors becomes a way for Western consciousness to decapitate the naive fundamentalism of its
hopefully-colored illusions.
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