If thoughts of ending your life are present, that is a medical emergency and not a stage of anything. Contact a crisis line in your country (findahelpline.com; in the US, call or text 988) or go to an emergency department. The fact that an old symbol describes a dark state does not make the state safe.

1 Watch

Episode 4 of THE GREAT WORKThe Black Sun — Why the Worst Depression Carries Its Own LightWatch the episode and read the essay →

2 Read

There is an image in the alchemical corpus that should not exist: a sun drawn where a sun belongs, high and central, with a black disc and rays. The sol niger. What makes it strange is not that it is dark. It is drawn as a source, in the place of the thing that illuminates.

It belongs to Saturn, the slowest and coldest planet, whose metal is lead and whose temperament is melancholic. Dürer engraved the condition in 1514 in Melencolia I: a winged figure surrounded by every instrument of making, none in use, eyes open.

Sparks in the dark

Jung took from the physician Heinrich Khunrath the doctrine of the scintillae: the darkness of the prima materia contains not one light but many small sparks. His argument was that the unconscious has its own partial luminosities. The black sun is what illumination looks like when it is not coming from the ego.

In this state people report something like the removal of a filter. You see who is present out of affection and who out of habit. You see the small adjustments you make to be liked. You see how much of what you called desire was avoidance. Most of this is accurate. That is exactly what makes the stage dangerous.

Observation and verdict

The black sun illuminates. It does not judge. The conclusion is supplied afterwards by an exhausted mind and smuggled in on the credibility of the perception.

That the arrangement of your life was arbitrary is an observation. That it was therefore worthless is a verdict. That much of what you built was avoidance is an observation. That you are a fraud is a verdict. The observations are the yield of this stage, and many will still be true and actionable in a year. The verdicts almost never survive a rested nervous system.

Write down what you see. Do not sign anything.

The way out is not a sunrise. It is the gathering of the sparks: brief, disconnected moments of ordinary interest, too small to argue about, until there are enough of them to constitute a light.

3 Practice

15 min

Two columns

Draw two columns: what I see, and what I concluded. Take three things that have felt true to you lately and split each one between the columns. Do not act on anything in the second column this week.

4 Write

Take one conclusion you have reached about your life recently. Which part of it did you see, and which part did you add?

Write by hand if you can, or somewhere private. Nothing is written or saved on this page.

5 Complete

Sources: C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14) and "On the Nature of the Psyche" (CW 8); Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (1595); Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (1964); Stanton Marlan, The Black Sun (2005). This lesson is educational and historical. It is not medical or psychological advice.