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EGO DEATH: BLACK SUN/THE RAVEN’S HEAD
“The principle of the art is the raven, who flies without wings on the blackness of the night and the brightness of the day.” . . .”The dragon shuns the light of the sun, and our dead son shall live. The king comes forth from the fire and rejoices in the marriage.”
Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis
Alchemists called the blackness of the initial depression, grief or stuckness, the Raven’s Head or Black Sun, nigredo, melancholia = Saturn/Earth. Rings of Saturn. The sun is surrounded by the anima media natura and is therefore black. It is a state of incubation or pregnancy, foretelling rebirth from the living death of repression, aridity, or inability to work. Here is the juxtaposition of Sun and Sol-Niger, the anti-sun.
Life as ego has known it in the past is outmoded—the old self-image must die. This precedes psychological revolution and creative reorganization. The black substance of our own shadow must be met and reconciled. Mourning the death of the old self. Emotional participation unblocks the flow of psychic energy and sense of meaning.
The birth of the healing power from the Nigredo belongs to the archetype of the wounded healer. It reflects the psychological capacity as stated by Kerenyi, “to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find the germs of recovery with which as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asklepios, the sunlike healer.” This healer’s mother name Coronis means “crow maiden”. The bird of Hermes is also the Raven.
The caput mortuum (death or death head) or raven head is the head of the black Osiris or Ethiopian and also of the “Moon” in the Chymical Wedding. The skull is the vessel of this alchemical transformation. Prior to the change in self-image, one lives a living death, identified only with the vacuousness of the ego’s relative position—a suffering of spiritual poverty.
I, The Juggler or The Magician does his balancing act between the Sun and the Moon, the personified opposites. 0 and XXI The World, Daath octave, Babe in the Abyss, Nihilism. The Nigredo is called “black, blacker than black,” an existential stuckness, the empty void. But by cooking this raw state, a lighter, enlightened condition can emerge. In Northwest native lore, Raven carried his ball of light into the sky, so we no longer live in darkness.
In the alchemical stage known as Putrefactio, we keep up a continual fire and regulate its action so that the Materia Universalis is purified, regenerated and perfected within one vessel and furnace. Nature herself does the work by means of her own inward Fire; but the later is stimulated by the Philosophical Fire. No other work is required from the Alchemist, to perform, but to keep up the Fire by aspiration and prayer.
ego death the black sun ravens head |
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