This is probably about as much as I can help with this, and it's taken from Carl Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, after having read a decent amount more of it and finding some better information on the black sun. It's fairly long, but it definitely seems worth adding to this thread, and I hope that it helps in some way :
But then he (Michael Maier) cites the classical saying of Hermes : "Son, extract from the ray its shadow," thus giving us clearly to understand that the shadow is contained in the sun's rays and hence could be extracted from them (whatever that might mean). Closely related to this saying is the alchemical idea of a black sun, often mentioned in the literature.* This notion is supported by the self-evident fact that without light there is no shadow, so that, in a sense, the shadow too is emitted by the sun. For this physics requires a dark object interposed between the sun and the observer, a condition that does not apply to the alchemical Sol, since occasionally it appears as black itself. It contains both light and darkness. "For what, in the end," asks Maier, "is the sun without a shadow? The same as a bell without a clapper." While Sol is the most precious thing, its shadow is res vilissima or quid vilius alga (more worthless than seaweed). The antinomian thinking of alchemy counters every position with a negation and vice versa. "Outwardly they are bodily things, but inwardly they are spiritual," says Senior. The view is true of all alchemical qualities, and each thing bears in itself it's opposite.
To the alchemical way of thinking the shadow is no mere privatio lucis; just as the bell and its clapper are of a tangible substantiality, so too are light and shadow. Only thus can the saying of Hermes be understood. In its entirety it runs : "Son, extract from the ray its shadow, and the corruption that arises from the mists which gather about it, befoul it and veil it's light; for it is consumed by necessity and by its redness." Here the shadow is thought of quite concretely; it is a mist that is capable not only of obscuring the sun but of befouling it ("coinquinare" - a strong expression). The redness (rubedo) of the sun's light is a reference to the red sulphur in it, the active burning principle, destructive in its effects. In man the "natural sulphur," Dorn says, is identical with an "elemental fire" which is the "cause of corruption," and this fire is "enkindled by an invisible sun unknown to many, that is, the sun of the Philosophers." The natural sulphur tends to revert to its first nature, so that the body becomes "sulphurous" and fitted to receive the fire that "corrupts man back to his first essence." The sun is evidently an instrument in the physiological and psychological drama of return to the prima materia, the death that must be undergone if man is to get back to the original condition of the simple elements and attain the incorrupt nature of the pre-worldy paradise. For Dorn this process was spiritual and moral as well as physical.
* Cf. Mylius, Phil. ref., p.19. Here the sol niger is synonymous with the caput corvi and denotes the anima media natura in the stage of nigredo, which appears when the "earth of the gold is dissolved by its own proper spirit." * Psychologically, this means a provisional extinction of the conscious standpoint owing to an invasion from the unconscious. Mylius refers to the "ancient philosophers" as a source for the sol niger. A similar passage occurs on p. 118: "The sun is obscured at its birth. And this denigration is the beginning of the work, the sign of putrefaction, and the sure beginning of the commixture." * This nigredo is the "changing darkness of purgatory." Ripley (Chymische Schrifften, p.51) speaks of a "dark" sun, adding: "You must go through the gate of the blackness if you would gain the light of Paradise in the whiteness."
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Long quotes aren't usually something I like to add to Temple threads, but in this case I thought that it was worth copying it out. There's some more info on the black sun in the book, but this is something that seems to explain the essence of it more than the other parts. For anyone interested in Alchemy though, I don't think you could go far wrong by getting this book, because it's amazing how many aspects of the art Jung seems to decrypt in its pages. |
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