You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Stanton Marian's self-expressed ‘reflective turn towards death’ (p. 3) prepared the way for his ‘engagement with the black sun, a dark and burning ball of fire, an intensity of darkness and light that became like a Zen koan to me’ (p. 4). His continued reflection takes the form of his new book, The Black Sun, the Alchemy and Art of Darkness, the tenth volume in the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology, published by Texas A&M University Press. A Jungian analyst in private practice in Pittsburgh, Marian has authored or edited numerous articles on the subject of the black sun. Bridging the gap created by what he believes was the ‘relatively marginal role the Sol Niger played in Jung's reflections’ (p. 4), he conceives his book as ‘an experiment in alchemical psychology’ moving thematically and enigmatically from ‘the nigredo of light to the mystery of an illuminated darkness’ (p. 211).
Structured in five chapters, the book encompasses a great deal in 214 pages, including the epilogue. In the first two chapters Marian reviews the archetypal principles of sun and king as emblems of consciousness, and alchemy's embracing of the ‘black blacker than black’ that mortifies the king, eclipses the sun and deconstructs the patriarchal privileging of the diurnal light. The third chapter is devoted to the subject of trauma. Marian challenges the notion of the black sun articulated by Donald Kalsched and Julia Kristeva, as a pathological, primitive expression of defence against unthinkable narcissistic woundings. Consistent with alchemy's ‘death is the conception of the stone’ Marian argues that the black sun intimates a symbolic death, a dissolution of defences of ego or self that might serve to break down the defensive stasis. Through the lens of subtle body disciplines like Kabbala, Taoist Alchemy and Tantrism as well as contemporary art, Chapter Four amplifies the image of the Sol Niger as alchemy's darkly luminescent light of nature, full of ambiguity and para