Black Sun: The Gravity of Power and Peril
There is a scene in the 1977 film Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope in which our protagonists downshift their spaceship out of light speed in anticipation of a friendly welcome on the planet of Alderaan. What they find, however, is a wasteland of rocky debris -- the planet is nowhere to be found. An enemy ship then lures them towards what appears to be a small moon. By the time the old wise man, Obiwan Kenobi, comprehends what has happened and utters with an ashen expression, "That's no moon. That's a space station," it is too late. Our heroes have become ensnared within the magnetic tentacles of the Death Star, an iconic cinematic image of world-destroying power at its most monstrous.
Joseph Campbell referred to symbols as "energy-evoking and -directing agent(s)." (1991, p. 143) The power of symbols to evoke energy within the human psyche derives from their connection to archetypes, which C.G. Jung theorized as primitive energetic patterns hardwired within the human psyche. A symbol, therefore, is an imagistic representation of an ineffable psychic reality. Our first encounter with the Death Star in Star Wars evokes certain feelings and energies, among them dread, fascination, and horror. We cannot look away -- we are, like our protagonists, powerless and awe-struck, momentarily paralyzed and taken hold of by an irresistible gravitational pull.
If we are to look at the Death Star symbolically, we recognize this evocative power of the image is tethered to an archetypal core within the human psyche. Like the Buddhist analogy that the dharma (teaching or way) is like a finger pointing at the moon (ultimate truth, enlightenment), the image of the Death Star points to an archetype that, by definition, can only be indirectly and incompletely referenced. The Death Star is one limited and partial outward expression of a powerful inner pattern inherent within the human psyche and within life itself, an archetype that has been symbolically expressed over the millennia variously as the dark sun, Sol niger, or the black sun.
Our Death Star scene from Star Wars illustrates an important point about symbols and the archetypes they refer to: a symbol can seize us, and in so doing, draw us closer to the archetypal pattern at its core. In the grail legends elaborated by the troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries, for example, the image of the grail (which Jung and Campbell postulated was a symbol of the Self, the archetype of wholeness) so "seizes" the knights of the Round Table that, henceforth, all of their energies are directed towards the ultimate goal of recovering this image.
Not all such seizures are so dramatic, and it is not uncommon for an archetype to knock on the door repeatedly, so to speak, in order to procure our attention. Sometimes we are not so much caught within the tractor beam of an archetype as we enter gradually, over a period of years or even decades, into its orbit. Such is my case with the black sun.
The scaffolding of this paper is a series of personal encounters with the black sun. These experiences and my responses to them (inexpert and sometimes flailing, but full of genuine curiosity) shed some light upon the manifold ways in which an archetype may express itself and how our relationship with an archetype can evolve and deepen over time, particularly when symbols are engaged through creative acts and active imagination.
Jung made it clear that working with archetypal energies was about much more than intellectual gratification. W.H. Auden famously wrote, "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand." (1991, p. 249) Whether we are aware of them or not, archetypal forces significantly influence our behavior and our overall experience of life. To become aware of these "powers", the inner patterns and engines of one's libidinal energy, is not to dominate or control them, but to bring into conscious awareness their tendencies and dynamics. Central to Jung's analytical psychology is the process of identifying and understanding how archetypal patterns manifest uniquely in one's own life as complexes, feeling-toned associations in present in the personal unconscious (Jacobi, 1999).
Without further ado, let us undertake an interstellar voyage to the black sun. Fittingly and paradoxically, the journey towards the archetypal (universal and protean) can only be made through the personal (specific and manifest). With a nod to our opening image of the Death Star and the Star Wars saga, we will demarcate this journey through episodes.
Episode I: Quest
From 2012 - 2016, I lived and worked in Big Sur, California. I have made a habit of exploring the work of the literary figures who have lived in the places I live, and thus, during my tenure in Big Sur, Henry Miller was inescapable. From 1944 - 1963, Miller lived on Partington Ridge, a steep, windy, dirt road close to where I worked. One leisurely Sunday morning I read Miller's review of an obscure and quixotic book, Quest, written by George Dibbern in 1941. Born in Germany in 1889, Dibbern left his homeland on a 32-foot sailboat as the Nazi party was closing in on total control of the country. He spent the remainder of his life largely at sea, renounced his German citizenship, and created his own passport and flag as a citizen of the world. Having spent several formative years in New Zealand, Dibbern was heavily influenced by the cultural and spiritual practices of the Maori. He named his boat, Te Rapunga, Maori for "The Dark Sun".
At the time of reading, I had very little familiarity with Jung's analytical psychology and was not consciously aware of the symbolism of the dark sun/black sun. I was, however, intrigued and inspired by Miller's review. At the time, I was beginning to entertain the notion of leaving both my job at the Esalen Institute and my career in sustainable agriculture. Dibbern's act of setting sail into the unknown and leaving behind an identity that constricted him touched an archetypal nerve. That evening, I sat down at the piano and wrote a song entitled Sailing on The Dark Sun that encapsulated the feelings of yearning, loneliness, danger, and excitement that Miller's piece had stirred in me.
Jung developed the term synchronicity to describe the phenomena of "meaningful coincidences" between inner and outer events. (Jung, 1975) Synchronicities defy causal explanation and suggest a relationship between the inner psychic world and the outer material world that has yet to be fully understood. Initially hesitant to publish his speculative ideas on synchronicity, Jung was emboldened by his friend and former analysand, the Nobel prize quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli. My various encounters with the black sun illustrate the role synchronicity often plays in establishing and developing conscious relationships with archetypes through their symbols.
Jung spent much of the last three decades of his life absorbed in the study of the medieval alchemists, for in their arcane efforts to turn base materials into gold, Jung saw an uncanny parallel to his observations about the inner workings of the psyche. He hypothesized that the alchemists projected the unconscious contents of their psyches into the materials they worked with, thereby creating in the aggregate a treasure trove of images and metaphorical instructions for the transformation of the psyche from lower to higher states of consciousness. (1954, p. 228).
What I did not know at the time of reading Miller's review of Quest was that the black sun, or dark sun, is a symbol closely associated with the nigredo, the "blackening" phase of the alchemical process. Psychologically, the nigredo is a phase of breakdown and dissolution, a time in which all that is solid and inflexible within the psyche becomes formless, liquid, putrefied. Commenting on the nigredo, James Hillman writes:
The two processes most relevant for producing blackness - putrefaction and mortification - break down the inner cohesion of any fixed state... Black is not itself a paradigm but a paradigm breaker. That's why it is placed as a phase within a process of colors, and why it appears again and again in life and work in order to deconstruct (solve et coagula) what has become an identity (1997, p. 9).
George Dibbern, who spent nearly five years at sea after leaving the fixity of his work, his family, his nation, and even the solidity of ground, was on a "night sea journey", another term associated with nigredo that alludes to the sun's (ego consciousness) nightly passage into the sea or the underworld (the unconscious). I came across Dibbern and his Te Rapunga just a few months before leaving the fixity of my career, my country (I moved from the United States to Canada), and the last vestiges of single life (I married and became a father within this same year). The seeds of the deconstruction of my own identity were already being sown.
The alchemical stage following the nigredo is referred to as the albedo, the whitening. Albedo has the same Latin root, albus, meaning "white", as the Italian word for dawn, alba. The albedo connotes a stage of (re)ordering of the psychic contents that have been broken down during the nigredo phase. In the Maori spiritual tradition which Dibbern felt so moved by, te rapunga refers to the third of eighteen steps of the Maori creation myth, "the pre-dawn, "dark sun" moment of anticipation referred to as "longing" or "seeking." (Dibbern) Unfamiliar with psychological alchemy and its symbolism, George Dibbern nonetheless chose a name for his boat that mirrored both the dissolution of identity he experienced on his night sea journey as well as the anticipation of the coming alba/dawn/albedo, a time when the world makes itself anew.
The uncanny intersections between alchemical symbolism and Maori spirituality in the life of an iconoclastic German sailor could be viewed as an interesting coincidence. From the standpoint of analytical psychology, however, these connections make sense in that the archetype of the black sun exists universally on the level of the collective unconscious. It is present in protean form, therefore, in the psyche of everyone in all cultures. It may manifest in slightly different symbols from culture to culture, but all fingers point to the same moon.
Episode II: Dark Star Revisited
Several years later, I attended a retreat near Santa Fe, New Mexico organized by the Animas Valley Institute entitled Sweet Darkness focused on working with the psychological shadow. During an active imagination exercise, participants were asked to visualize an image of their deepest gift. I imagined a river providing life-giving sustenance and support to surrounding life forms. We were then asked to imagine a nemesis, at which point the image of a black sun came to me. Later that day, we were given several hours alone on the land, a large expanse of semi desert dotted with junipers and crisscrossed by dry arroyos, to deepen our felt sense of these images. I lay on the hot, dry earth, feeling the rays of the sun. I felt intuitively that the sun and the black sun were somehow one and the same. The blessings of the sun's warmth become a curse if the land is not resourced, i.e. if there is not a healthy ecosystem of plants to receive the sun's gifts. The sun is our ultimate source of life, but when we degrade the landscape (as hundreds of years of ranching have done to New Mexico and climate change is doing the planet writ large), the sun becomes a killing, desiccating force.
With this insight, I returned to our empty meeting space and sat down at the piano. A melody came immediately, and I thought to call the piece Dark Sun Revisited, a companion piece to the one I had written some three years earlier. I heard someone enter and sit behind me to listen. I did not turn around to see who it was until I had finished composing the piece. In Animas Valley programs, some participants choose to use names that speak to an image of their own depths. When I turned around, I was greeted by the smiling visage of one of the most powerful and inspiring presences in our group, a young, non-binary African American teacher and activist who went by the name Black Star.
At the time of the Sweet Darkness program, I had been in Jungian analysis for nearly a year and had some very basic knowledge analytical psychology, but I was still unfamiliar with alchemy and its symbolism. It was months later when I came across the black sun, the Sol niger, in the writings of Marie Louise von Franz.
"The Sol niger would be the dark shadowy aspect of consciousness. Thus the sun god in mythology often has a hidden destructive aspect... The negative aspect of the sun is especially realized in hot countries where the burning midday sun destroys all the plants. In hot countries ghosts come out at noon and in the Bible, for instance, there is the demon of midday. The dark or shadow side of the sun is demonic. (p.156)"
The luminescence of the sun is so brilliant that it often "forgets" it has a shadow. This is the blindness and the hubris of the conscious aspect of psyche that "forgets" there is an unconscious as well. Jungian analyst Stanton Marlin elaborates on both of these aspects of the sun symbolism.
"As an inner figure, [the Sun King] is fundamental to life and a well-functioning psyche. There is a long tradition of the King and the Sun reflecting the qualities of rational order, stability, life force, vitality, blessing, joy and light... the problem begins when these archetypal forces overwhelm a developing or immature ego, inflating and corrupting it. When the ego identifies with the transpersonal power of the King and the ego becomes King, the Tyrant is near, and the King's energy can be devouring." (2005, p. 14)
It is this inflating, devouring potential of the immature ego's identification with the archetypal Self that is so vividly depicted in Star War's Darth Vader, Heart of Darkness's Kurtz, or the Lord of the Flies' Jack. Each of these characters succumb to the seduction of godlike power only to find that same power of the archetype ultimately overwhelms and destroys them. Just as the sun's rays prove destructive when the outer ecology is compromised, so too the energy of the Self can desiccate or devour life when the ecology of ego-consciousness is unhealthy, underdeveloped, or one-sided. When we look to Greek tragedy and recognize that the prevailing theme is that of hubris, we get a sense of just how long humanity has grappled with the peril of inflation and identification with the gods (i.e. archetypal forces).
Episode III: Heart of Darkness
Nearly a year after the New Mexico retreat, I have the following dream. "I am attending a music festival hosted at a large high school. I enter a classroom to listen to one of the acts. Black Star enters after me, and they pull out a gun and begin shooting. I run out of the classroom and away from Black Star. They chase me down a corridor, but I manage to avoid being shot. Later I am on a bus and Black Star is in the front of the bus with a friend. They seem exhausted but relieved - Black Star mentions they had been infected with the idea of a school shooting like a virus, and now it is out of their system. The friend hands Black Star a cyanide pill, which they bite down upon. Their face makes horrible grimaces before ultimately smiling before death."
Joseph Campbell said, "dream and vision are of 'subtle matter.' Extremely fluent and mercurial." (2002, p. 100) One of the curious aspects of earnestly engaging with symbols is that, in retrospect, certain dreams or experiences seem anticipatory and lay the groundwork for further unveiling. Such is the case with the aforementioned experience with Black Star and the subsequent dream about them. Another image of the black sun emerged in the dark days of Nazi Germany, and the power of the archetype has been tragically drawn upon to fuel racism and violence.
Assigned to deliver a presentation on a symbol for the Pacifica course Joseph Campbell and the Mythmakers Path, I decided I would deepen my engagement with this symbol that had been emerging in different guises and contexts over the period of five years: the black sun. Expecting to find the black sun of alchemical symbolism, my research uncovered another black sun symbol. This black sun adorned the central ceremonial room of Heinrich Himmler's Wewelsberg Castle. Himmler, head of the Nazi SS (schutzstaffel or"protection squadron"), established Wewelsberg as the axis mundi of Nazi esoteric spirituality. Like Hitler and other prominent Nazi's, Himmler had been greatly influenced by a renewed, intense, and nationalistic interest in an idealized, pre-Christian Germanic spirituality, a revival that traced its origins to the Romantic völkisch movement of the early 19th century. Reliable knowledge of pre-Christian Germanic spirituality was fragmented at best, which left occultists like the influential SS brigade leader Karl Maria Wiligut room to weave a mixture of myth, esoteric mysticism, ancient symbols, and racial animus into a toxic spiritual and political cocktail. (Sunner, 1997)
Wiligut believed that the Germanic race descended from Hyperboreans, a mythic race of giant, godlike people mentioned by Pindar and Herodotus who lived "beyond the north wind." In the time of the Hyperboreans, it was believed, two suns that battled for dominion. Santur, the defeated sun, remained in the sky, darkened but still a vital reservoir of spiritual energy for the rebirth of the Aryan race under the Third Reich.
After the fall of Nazis led to a strong cultural taboo surrounding the swastika symbol, Himmler and Wiligut's schwarzesonne has been embraced by far-right and neo-Nazi groups as an alternative to the swastika. The relative obscurity of the schwarzesonne is rapidly fading, however, as the symbol has been used in ever more overt and destructive contexts. Several of the most horrific racially-motivated mass shootings, including the recent attacks in Christchurch, NZ and El Paso, TX were perpetrated by white supremacists who reportedly used the schwarzesonne symbol in their manifestos.
What can these deeply troubling recent manifestations of the black sun symbol reveal about the archetype at the core? How is it that the same psychic nucleus can lead one person to become a set sail and become a citizen of the world and another to violently pursue dark fantasies of racial purification? These questions defy simple answers. They point to the paradox inherent in all archetypes, particularly one as complex and encompassing as the black sun. As we orbit closer and closer to black sun, we feel the crushing insistence of the fundamental tensions at play in the human psyche. As Stanton Marlin notes, the very notion of the Self as the archetype of wholeness is problematic because it leaves no room for chaos and brokenness. Jung explored a similar quandary in the figure of Christ, who in Christian theology is utterly devoid of sin. For Hillman, the root of the problem lies in our cultural tendency toward binary thinking and the literalization of metaphor. The result, according to Hillman, is that pairs like white/black, light/dark, heaven/hell become unnecessarily oppositional.
"If heavenly whiteness maintains its supremacy by including all hues and unifying them into one self-same translucence (white is the entire visible spectrum undifferentiated by sensible degrees), this second kind of supremacy maintains purity by exclusion. Innocence excludes: "innocent" literally denotes an absence of noxiousness; without harm or hurt--a privative notion of supremacy... Black becomes necessary to whiteness as that co-relative by means of which white takes on its defensive, exclusive definition as im-maculate, un-polluted, in-nocent. Because purity necessarily constellates that which its purity cannot include, it cannot move unless it falls." (1986)
The rise of the black sun as a contemporary symbol for hate makes developing a more conscious relationship with the archetype at its core all the more of a collective imperative, lest the destructive aspects of its power unconsciously add more fuel to the fires of intolerance.
Karl Maria Wiligut's belief in the schwarzesonne Santur, mythologically speaking, carries some truth to it. In the human psyche, the "victory" of the sun (consciousness) is not complete, nor should we want it to be. The black sun of the unconscious maintains its power and place in the psyche, if not the heavens, regardless of whether or not we are aware of its presence.
References
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Campbell, J. with Moyers, B. (1991). The power of myth. New York, NY: Anchor Books.
Campbell, J. (2002) Flight of the wild gander: explorations in the mythological dimension. Novato, CA: New World Library.
George Dibbern Information [web page]. (n.d.). Retrieved August 10, 2019, from http://georgedibbern.com/george-dibbern
Hillman, J. (1997) The seduction of black, Spring (67), 1-15.
Hillman, J. (1986) Notes on white supremacy: essaying an archetypal account of historical events, Spring (46), 29-58.
Jacobi, J. (1999) Complex/archetype/symbol in the psychology of C.G. Jung. London: Rutledge.
Jung, C.G. (1975). Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) The collected works of C.G. Jung (vol. 8). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1948)
Jung, C. G. (1954). Religious Ideas in Alchemy. In R. F. C. Hull (Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 3). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Marlin, S. (2005). The black sun: the alchemy and art of darkness. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press.
von Franz, M.L. (1980) Alchemy: an introduction to the symbolism and the psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Sunner, R. (1997). Black sun: the mythological background of national socialism. Brooklyn, NY: ICARUS Films.