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Stanton Marlan's book, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, is an exquisitely written and produced volume, and almost twice the size of any other book in the Fay Series. This book is a veritable reader's feast which is teeming with quotations from many cultural, literary and artistic sources. It is a celebration of darkness, if such a thing can be imagined. Marlan explores the meaning of blackness, melancholia and depression through case studies and amplifications from alchemy and the arts. The black and white illustrations are helpful, and the glossy colour plates are positively sumptuous. It seems a paradoxical book in many ways, because never was such colour and excitement gathered to salute the darkness and acknowledge depression. Marlan announces that he thought a lot about death in his childhood, and images of darkness and death had an obsessive grip on his imagination. In this book, I get the sense that he is staring his childhood obsession down, or re-experiencing it as a source of dark knowledge.
As an analyst, he is looking into his early obsession and trying to find richness and colour in it. As he puts it, darkness is not just an absence of light, but is itself a particular kind of light: ‘The black sun is a paradox. It is blacker than black, but it also shines with a dark luminescence that opens the way to some of the most numinous aspects of psychic life’ (p. 5). The reader goes on a dark journey into the underworld of the psyche, and Marlan warns the reader that what he or she is about to experience is ‘difficult and uncomfortable’ (p. 27). There is something different about this book, which seems un-Jungian. There is a reluctance to see darkness as a prelude to light, depression as prelude to awareness, and morbidity as a prelude to renewal. In this book, we are supping with Hades in the Underworld, and we ought not to be in a hurry to escape his clutches.
This is not classical Jungian thought with its emphasis on individuation. Marlan makes