The Book Of Symbols 10...

Darkness

Out from the darkness back into the darkness- affairs of the cat. Issa

Throughout our lives- in the daily circadian rhythms of sleep of sleep and waking, the creative process of play and invention, the thought waiting for emergence out of the depths of the unconscious; during periods of introversion when the allure of the outer world is stilled and the transpersonal encountered at the horizon of consciousness- we, like the cat, repeatedly come out of the darkness and go back into darkness. Darkness is our first reality, the looming riddle of our becoming. Like the macrocosmic galaxy hypothetically plunged in a globe of "dark matter" and permeated with mysterious "dark energy," so our own microcosmic being, quickening in the womb, is enveloped by the dark matter and dark energy of our ancestral inheritance.

Darkness is defined most simply as the absence of light, and out experience of the one may initially take shape as the observe of our experience of the other. We think of light, for instance, as clarifying and delineating. The world comes into being at daybreak. Darkness, on the other hand, as Rilke reminds us, absorbs and merges the many into one: 

But the darkness pulls in everything: 

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

 how easily it gathers them!-

While light is quick, propulsive, transparent, darkness is still and waiting and opaque. Light beams, transmits, radiates; darkness extinguishes, eclipses, swallows. Darkness is tunnel, abyss, maw, the city in the blackout, the locked closet, the roach scurrying over the countertop before the kitchen light goes on. It is the veiled face and cloaked body. It is the massive iceberg concealed beneath the pitchy surface of the sea, the miasmic land of the dead, the "nighttime nothingness" of the shadowed edge of the moon. 

Inscrutably, darkness presides over the brooding latency

and ghostly luminescence of sea and sky. North

Pacific Ocean, Stinson Beach, by Hiroshi Sugimoto,

gelatin silver print, 1994.

As absence, darkness attracts human projections of moral or mental deficiency, often translated in terms of sin or evil: the Koran's chapter Light, dor example, describes the deeds of the disbeliever as "darkness on a vast abysmal sea... layer upon layer of darkness." A "heart of darkness" in Joseph Conrad's imagination is one governed by abhorrent passions and base instincts that tempt the "unlawful soul" beyond the defining boundaries of humanity. For Sylvia Plath, darkness is intimate and impending: 

I am terrified by this dark thing

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, 

its malignity.

Darkness often evokes the teeming formlessness of the beginning: "Darkness there was" the Rig Veda declares, "at first concealed in darkness this A; was discriminated chaos." Or it may suggest an impoverishment of spirit or substance. Hinduism's Kali Yuga or "dark age," for instance, lacking the ordering force of dharma, the holy law, is rife with hubris, greed, and war. Alchemy associates the imagery of darkness with nigredo- the stage in which the ego is confronted not only with the weight of its earthliness and unlived possibilities but also with its capacity for evil. 

Yet what appears to be only absence, emptiness and obscurity may actually point to a luminosity, presence, and fullness of being peculiar to darkness' domain. Is it not, after all, alive and stirring? 

I'm getting the spirit in the dark

I'm getting the spirit in the dark

People movin, aw, ain't we groovin?

Just getting the spirit in the dark.

Aretha Franklin, Spirit in the Dark

According to the fourth-century Christian writer Gregory of Nyssa, it is only after one has quenched the brilliant light of the reasoning mind that one may enter most immediately into the presence and knowledge of god: "Moses' vision of God began with light, afterward God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw god in the darkness." 

The "Black Sun" of the alchemical stage of the

nigredo signifies an eclipse of the ego's standpoint due

to an incursion of the unconscious. Though depicted

as an encounter with death, the presence of the angels

testifies to the necessity of this provisional darkening in

order to achieve the opus. Viridarium chymicum, 

1624, Germany. 

Preeminently, darkness is the precinct of initiation. In the enchanted forest, the shamanic cave, the black pool or the well, the darkness theater, the alcheringa time, the Asclepian temple one comes face to face with the agony and the muted rapture fo death and (re) birth. The experience of initiatory darkness, as evoked by T.S. Eliot, is, to be sure, one of paradox and ambiguity:

O dark dark dark...

I said to my soul, be still,

and let the dark come upon you...

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;...

Wait without thought,

for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light,

and the stillness the dancing. 

But if one consciously enters into the darkness and endures its enshroudment; if catlike, one learns to see and to hear acutely in its recesses, te darkness will gradually reveal the treasures concealed there. In the process, darkness will become the mysterious and familiar source of transformation and inspiration, growth and healing to which, repeatedly, we gratefully return:

You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world...

Rainer Maria Rilke, You, Darkness 

of Nyssa, St.Gregory, Jean Daniélou and Herbert 

Musurillo. From Glory to Glory: Texts from 

Gregory of Nyssa's Mystical Writings.

Crestwood, NY, 1979. 

~Bella