The unconscious itself is simultaneously light and dark as the prima materia itself is: It is not a comfortable place: it contains riches, but it also contains dangers. It holds all we have suppressed; and actively suppress, in the name of sanity. The real danger is where there is no containment for what is going on, in which case there is no flask either. Then the process is projected outside us, for instance as murder, or even suicide. What has been called ‘lead mania’ is also a possibility here which can go with the feeling of being posined as well as grey faced. (in alchemy alchemist suffered delusional states as a result of the toxic materials they were working with – repressed feelings???). However, inwardly we can see this positively as well as in terms of the imagination and also dreams (which find a way to represent these in symbolic and metaphorical terms and images).
The kind of dreams we have in the nigredo (depressive state where the unconscious is percolating or seeping through consciousness) may be full of darkness but within that is the light of consciousness trying to rise up. Marie Louise von Franz said that light is found in the shadowly impulses which are full of meaning if one can use love to investigate them instead of being turned away by one’s own judgement or fear.
Nigredo can also be about the death of illusion…. the death of what is after all not real, or not yet real, as painful as this can be, especially in the context of a relationship. This death of illusion is a lonely business, but like anything major in our lives, we often have to go through it alone, to find the strength it can bring – just as we think it is tearing us apart….. “The better the quality of the negative, the deeper the development.
Nigredo may seem to sever us from all the light, we’ve ever known, but it always brings us to something deeper in ourselves where that light can shine again – whether it is our own body, as a result of being ungrounded, or in relationship to a man or a woman, or in connection to our own authority rather than someone else’s, whether as an individual, a parent or an institution.
So nigredo, strangely is not just about pain and darkness, thought it can bloody well seem like it the time. This where acceptance is vital, so we can see, in a deeper way, the initiation it represents. We need above all here, I think, to see what we are being brought down to – the ash, the soul. Then we gain the soul’s way of seeing, the soul’s way of understanding.
Jay Ramsay
Alchemy : The Art of Transformation
Emerging From The Dark Night 