On Nigredo
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
T.S. Eliot — East Coker
As I get older, I start to recognise certain repeating moments in my life, certain seasons, processes, stations of the wheel. And because I’m older, and perhaps also a little wiser, I’ve learned not to fear them so much, because I remember what they have to teach, and also what then comes after.
This moment is nigredo. That’s the name for a process the alchemists described — and Jung later elaborated — in which the materials to be transformed are blackened, decomposed, and reduced to their most base essence. Alchemy, though, was never just about the transformation of material substances from one form into another, but also about the transformation of the alchemist himself, with the ultimate goal being a state of unity of opposing forces or drives.
In Jung’s esoteric delvings, he saw nigredo quite similar to what the Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross, had seen as the dark night of the soul. It was a state of necessary despair and ego death, where all previous beliefs prove themselves to have been false, all identities reveal themselves to have been merely masks, and everything which seemed once certain and solid melts into air.
Nigredo isn’t a singular moment, however, but rather a repeating process. In alchemy, substances required multiple transformations, a repeating cycle from nigredo to rubedo and then back again. What we think we know and who we think we are likewise must be blackened repeatedly, “destroyed” (though never annihilated) and then reforged like the repeating seasons of the earth. We die, are born, and then die again so to be reborn, all the while still “living” and striving towards a time when the drives that defeat us and the drives that create us become lovers to each other.
The soul work of alchemy relies on a framework that’s become quite anathema in our current age, that of polarities and opposing equal forces. In other words, “binaries,” though not anything like the computer sense of the term. They are not just one set of polarities, but multiple oppositions — masculine and feminine, solve and coagula, expansion (Jupiter) and contraction (Saturn), yin and yang. Each part of a pair leads to, regulates, opposes, and births its counterpart in a relentless dance, constantly trying to solve the other’s contradictions and excesses.
When in balance, which is never a state of equilibrium, these oppositions create the world. It’s easiest seen in the unity of male and female in the act of sex, which — despite all the transhumanist fantasies that we can escape the earth — is how each of us has come into being. An example less likely to trigger the fanatics, however, is the way a gardener must both nurture and cull in order to have anything to eat. Let every one of a thousand seeds grow in a small area of soil, and not one of them will grow large enough to bear fruit; kill off most of them to let a few strong ones survive, and you’ve actually then got a garden.
That latter part, the culling, is a terrifying truth we’re not much fond of regarding. To kill something so that other things can live sounds like cruelty, and one immediately wonders anyway who is wise enough to decide which (or who) should live and which (or who) should not. Any gardener knows the absurdity of this question, though: there is no moral authority to call upon in such matters. You sow multiple seeds because you’ve no way of predicting which will sprout and which will not, and you’ve anyway got no say in the matter. The seeds decide, and it’s then up to you to choose which of them you’ll nurture and which of them you’ll cull. Choose all or none of them, and you’ve made sure none of them will become what they want to be. You have to choose, and there’s no right or wrong decision, and that’s the terrible burden of being human.
Where things get truly awful to countenance is when such decisions involve not plants but humans. Large scale questions about energy consumption and industrial civilization, for example, or how much freedom to limit to avoid death during a pandemic. Those who make those decisions have no more insight than the rest of us, only more awareness of the competing influences and a better vantage from which to watch the results of their choices.
Bogs in Ireland are littered with the corpses of sacrificed victims with the nipples cut off, because ancient people had a mechanism for punishing kings who made bad decisions. There in Ireland, the priest class (the druids), upon understanding the unfitness of the king in the eyes of the gods and the people, sacrificed him. Why cut off his nipples, though? Because the king was an embodiment of both male leadership and female nurture; supplicants would kiss and suck at his nipples to show fealty.
We still suckle at the nipples of the powerful, but we no longer have a way of drowning them when the land has turned against them. Instead, they remain in power, or are voted out and then go on speaking tours, while the crops wither, the oceans rise, and the people suffer.
The matter of a king embodying both the masculine and the feminine in one body is worth more attention, as that’s still how we look at the state’s role in our lives. We think of it as both mother and father, nurturer and protector. We expect it to care for those who cannot care for themselves, to educate our children, to provide for us, to feed us; we want it also to protect us from harm, to police streets and borders, punish criminals and foreign enemies, and to collect the spoils of war (oil, usually) for our benefit.