December 1, 2023
The days are so short now, just three weeks from the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year. Along with the darkness, in this part of the world, come cold, snow, and seasonal affective disorder. The year is dying, and we feel ourselves dying with it. We are conscious of our mortality, and of the transience of all things.
Some literary critics insist that there are no universal symbols. But there are symbols based on universal human experiences, and the alternation of light and darkness is one of them. What the critics mean is that different cultures interpret those symbols differently, which is quite true, but they do so according to what Northrop Frye called primary concerns, concerns common to the whole human race. Calendrical complexities keep them from being exactly synchronized, but at least three religions mark the solstice season by a festival in which light is kindled in the midst of the darkness: Hindu Diwali, Jewish Hannukah, and of course Christmas. You do not have to be an intellectual or a mystic to understand and respond to such symbolism. I have always completely sympathized with the people who keep their holiday lights not only up but lit until February. I have my tree—a towering 9-foot one that can be seen from the street 450 feet away, a beacon in the darkness. The room looks bare and austere after it comes down, lying for another year in its huge coffinlike boxes in the basement storage room until it rises again next year. I cannot imagine not having a Christmas tree, and it has nothing to do with any religious belief, at least not of an ordinary kind. Christmas trees aren’t Christian anyway: they are models of the world tree, a form of the vertical axis mundi that structures many cosmologies. The world tree is rooted in the underworld and rises from our middle earth to form the heavens above: the lights are the stars, the bulbs are the planets, and the star or angel at the apex is the presence of God or whatever you want to call the mystery beyond us all.
In the Biblical tradition, light is good and dark is evil; light is life and darkness is evil; light is spirit and darkness is the demonic. The source of all life and goodness is God, and God is light according to the hymn that opens the Gospel of John: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (1:5). It is sometimes said that John seems designed to be an opening to the entire New Testament, and thus a counterpart to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, in which God’s first creative act is to command, “Let there be light.” In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the axis mundi is not a tree, but heaven is up and hell is down, a pit at the bottom of which lies the Prince of Darkness. In the third section of the poem, the Paradiso, Dante’s journey into heaven is the greatest of all light shows. Its opening, however, states that the light that is spirit, and therefore is God, is not sequestered in heaven but pervades the entire cosmos:
The glory of the One Who moves all things Penetrates all the universe, reflecting In one part more and in another less. (Canto 1, 1-3, Mark Musa translation)
The Muse that Dante invokes for his quest for the source of this light is no less than Apollo himself, leader of the Muses and God of the sun. At the other end of the canticle, before he attempts to describe his experience of the divine presence itself, he calls upon the power of which all Muses and pagan gods are merely symbols:
O Light Supreme, so far beyond the reach of mortal understanding, to my mind relend now some small part of Your own Self… (Canto 33, 67-69)
The light is sublime: we walk out under the winter midnight sky and see the world tree glitter above us. But the light is also with us and among us: it comforts us in the valley of the shadow, so that we fear no evil. Our prehistoric ancestors huddled in their caves around the fire that warmed and kept night’s predators at bay, and we have not forgotten that comfort. The hearth fire is a symbol of home, the place where we are warm and safe.
The vision of light is magnificent, and gives us hope in these dark times. And yet—. And yet symbolism is never that simple, because life is never that simple. In the traditional vision of light, light and dark are what William Blake called a Negation, opposites that merely conflict, that negate each other. Such opposites are either-or, leading to a kind of absolutism in which the only resolution is for one opposite to repress or annihilate the other. Thus we get various forms of dualism in which the light will someday achieve a final victory over the darkness. Or, as in the Scandinavian and Germanic mythology that Wagner dramatized in his Ring cycle of operas, the opposites mutually annihilate each other, like matter and antimatter, in a Götterdämmerung, a final battle, after which the cycle begins all over again. This kind of dualism is the basis of much of the either-or thinking in human life. It drives various forms of nationalistic and religious fanaticism in which compromise is deemed unthinkable. The tragedy of Gaza is that both Hamas and the Israeli far right are in the grip of nationalistic religious extremism of this sort, for which the lives of ordinary Palestinian and Jewish people are expendable, sacrifices for a greater cause.
A black-and-white view appeals to those who yearn for the certainty of clear and simple answers. We are the white hats, and they are the black hats. Anything else is a kind of fuzzy liberal relativism born of moral cowardice and a decadent love of comfort. Such uncompromising idealism is born of a kind of perfectionism—the problem being that no individual and no nation is ever perfect. We all have the darkness within us as well as the light, a second, hidden nature that Jung calls the shadow. Last week I spoke of conservative outrage because the ideal portrait of America that my generation grew up on is now challenged by those who point all the truths that have to be denied in order to keep up the fiction that the United States has always been a shining example of democracy and land of opportunity: the racism, the sexism, the hatred of sexual difference, the xenophobia that denies the Statue of Liberty, the contempt for the poor by the privileged classes who exploit them. All of these depend on what Jung called projection. Those who cannot bear to admit the darkness within themselves project it on other people, often whole groups of people who become the Other. Jung criticized Christianity for its perfectionism, its adherence only to the light and denial of its own shadow, which it projected on others. Thus does a religion of love justify the torturing of heretics, the burning of witches, the ghettoization of Jews. Another product of the denial of the shadow is narcissism. Narcissists look in the mirror, ask who is the fairest of them all, and explode with rage if they get anything but a 5-star approval rating. The pathological lying of Trump and George Santos is born of the need to maintain a grandiose self-image, and Trump’s legendary touchiness indicates that he knows that image is a lie, and fears that others know it too.
Jung was audacious enough to write a book, Answer to Job, that suggests that God himself has a shadow. Many people are repelled by that idea: God is absolutely perfect, all light and no dark. But it would certainly explain some things about the inconceivable amount of innocent suffering in the world. Contrary to popular opinion, not all versions of religion, not even all versions of Christianity, posit a perfect God, a God who is all light and no darkness. It may be that Gnostic Christianity attracts some people in our time because it conceives the Fall as a fall of some part of the divine nature, so that divinity and humanity fell together, and are striving together to redeem themselves. To some people, that beats the image of God as the ostensibly perfect being who inexplicably condemns most of his creatures to suffering in life and damnation after death. Strangely, the ability to love depends upon recognition of our own imperfection and that of the beloved. As W.H. Auden says, “You must love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.” We cannot love the perfect, because it is inhuman. And, again contrary to popular opinion, the perfect cannot love us, because we fall short of its high standards and are condemned. “Few saved, many damned” was a catchphrase of the Middle Ages. Contrastingly, the true foundation of Christianity is the tremendous intuition of agape, the love that loves anyway, despite imperfection. There is a reason that the Covenant between God and his people in the Old Testament is constantly likened to a marriage. But a true marriage is of equals, and acceptance is a two-way street. It may be that those who love God the most are those who, like Job, howl against him in outrage, and yet refuse to give up on him. Whereas, in a human relationship, those who have high standards may simply walk away from love in disillusionment, blaming the lover for not coming up to those standards, which the lover no doubt indeed failed to do.
Judge not that ye be not judged, but the impossible demand of the human condition is that we must strive towards the ideal, the light, and we cannot always avoid judgment of both ourselves and others. Some of our personal shadow is genuinely evil, the selfishness that we are born with, what Christianity calls original sin. The best we can do is to try to become aware of it, try to overcome or restrain it, accepting that at some point we will fail, and accepting ourselves despite our failure, our limitations. We are not “godlike,” and not meant to be, and maybe God isn’t either. It’s complicated.
It is even more complicated by the fact that confronting our shadow entails an act of judgment distinguishing what is truly evil from that which is dark because it is unknown. Consciousness has an age-old association with light, and the unconscious with darkness. In The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), Erich Neumann created a mythic model based on the myth of the hero, in which the heroic ego is the sun battling against the forces of darkness. Although Neumann was influenced by Jung, the model is actually rather Freudian, because the solar ego is a masculine figure struggling to get born and achieve autonomy, fighting against a regressive, feminine unconscious that wants to swallow the ego back into itself again. The Babylonian Creation myth is one such narrative: the hero, Marduk, fights a feminine monster, Tiamat, who is also the sea, the unconscious matrix of life. Marduk kills Tiamat and makes the world out of her body. The victory over Tiamat signifies the victory of order over original chaos.
It is a victory of the sun, and kings have always used solar imagery to signify their power and glory, including crowns, which are solar haloes. But the solar god’s victory is also that of the masculine over the feminine, so that, in this model, the origin of ego consciousness is also the origin of patriarchy, the need to dominate women because men project on them the lure of the abyss of the unconscious, the “unmanly” desire to return to the womb.
Like Freud, and following the 19th-century theorist Bachofen, Neumann projected this psychological drama back into history, imagining an earlier matriarchal culture that was conquered and subsumed by later patriarchal cultures. Neumann interpreted this as a kind of fortunate fall. The solar ego has to break with the darkness of the unconscious in order to get born. Unfortunately, this makes patriarchy into a kind of regrettable necessity, a phase of history necessary for the development of consciousness. To revert to Blake’s terms, Neumann made the solar ego and dark unconscious into a Negation, into tragically conflicting opposites. A better model would be something like the Taoist yin and yang diagram, in which dark and light, masculine and feminine, and indeed all opposites whatsoever, are not either-or but both-and, not ultimately antagonistic but synergetic. This actually fits Jung’s own gender theory, in which all human beings are both masculine and feminine. Someone who identifies as masculine has a hidden feminine aspect, the anima; someone who identifies as feminine has a hidden masculine identity, the animus. I suspect, or at least wonder whether, when someone identifies as non-binary, they are not rejecting the traditional either-or relationship of masculine and feminine in favor of a relationship that is both-and. Neumann’s is a sad case, really. Far from being some sort of masculinist, he wrote entire books advocating a return to and revaluation of the feminine, asserting that the dominance of the masculine solar ego has by this point in history become extreme and one-sided. Jung borrowed a term from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, enantiodromia, by which a one-sided conscious view is liable to a compensatory swing in the opposite direction. Neumann felt we are experiencing such a compensatory reversal now, a position that has its value apart from his attempt to rationalize ego-dominance and male dominance as a necessary developmental stage of civilization.
Light has come to symbolize not just consciousness in general but specifically the power of reason, in opposition to the darkness of irrationality and superstition. While the association has always existed, it came to prominence in the 18th century Age of Reason, also significantly called the Enlightenment. The partial discrediting of religion after religious wars that lasted for most of the 17th century combined with the rise of science produced at this time an imaginative revolution resulting in a modern mythology. As belief in the traditional supernatural God declined, a new belief began to rival it, a conviction that humanity is responsible for improving its own lot through drawing upon the light of reason within. It is often pointed out how many of our terms for intellectual activity are visual metaphors often involving imagery of light. We speak of illumination, of intellectual brilliance, of a light bulb going on when we have a sudden insight, of reflection, of casting light on a problem, and so on. Faith in the power of reason to remake human life produced a wave of utopian thinking, especially as science developed from a search for knowledge to the development of technology. Sir Francis Bacon had envisioned a scientific utopia in The New Atlantis a century earlier, but the dream now began to come true in the form of the Industrial Revolution. But rationalist idealism also began to rethink religion and politics. A new form of Christianity, Deism, reimagined God as a craftsman who designed the rational order of the universe that had been discovered by Newton, Kepler, and others, fashioned its intricate mechanism as a watchmaker fashions a watch, but did not intervene in any way once the mechanism was set ticking. It is, after all, a poor craftsman who designs a mechanism that has to be constantly tinkered with.
The order of nature was designed according to rational principles, and, since humanity is part of nature, so is human nature. The pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were held to be self-evident to human reason because they are inherent in the laws of nature itself. As the phrasing implies, many of the Founding Fathers were Deists who founded democracy not upon supernatural sanction or tradition but upon rational principles. American democracy was and is a radical experiment resting upon the faith that humanity is capable of a freedom based on a rationality grounded in the order of nature.
The Enlightenment faith in the light of reason was, however, one-sided. A narrow rationalism distrusted anything that had its roots in the darkness of the unconscious, including emotion, imagination, and what in religion was called "enthusiasm." Anything seen as irrational was projected upon other peoples, whether in “darkest Africa” or the wildernesses of North America, and dismissed as “savagery.” The enantiodromia that compensated for this one-sidedness was Romanticism. In its early forms especially, Romanticism could be characterized by Leonard Cohen’s phrase, “You want it darker.” In Germany, the emotionalism of the Sturm und Drang, or storm and stress movement, actually resulted in copycat suicides imitating that of the protagonist of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which romanticized, in all senses, what used to be called melancholia and is now called clinical depression. The prototype of the melancholic hero, or anti-hero, is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who wears black and whose most famous soliloquy debates the merits of suicide. In the United States, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking rejects civilization to live in the wilderness, his best friend a noble savage, the Indigenous figure of Chingachgook. In England, Byron popularized the dark, brooding, doomed but glamorous figure of the “Byronic hero,” a rebel figure modeled on Milton’s Satan, progenitor of any number of doomed, damned rock stars, most famously Jim Morrison. Coleridge wrote three dark-haunted poems: “Kubla Khan,” Christabel, and Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the first of these, the poet draws his inspiration from a mysterious hidden source. The popularity of Gothic fiction, with its ruined castles, ghosts, and mad monks, indicates an attraction to the dark side that was highly disapproved of by novelists in the comedy of manners tradition such as Jane Austen, who satirized it. But Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein marks the birth of the genre of horror out of the Gothic. The critic John Clute said that horror is the only genre named after its affect rather than its narrative structure, but the affect is not limited to fear and disgust. Especially in its greater examples, it goes deeper than such emotions into the realm of strangeness that Freud called “the uncanny,” the mood evoked when something out of the unconscious invades the realm of ordinary rational life. The ancestor of the uncanny Gothic is Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The subtitle of Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus, indicates that the novel is a critique of scientific hubris. Victor Frankenstein thinks of himself as a new Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the jealous gods and gave it to human beings. In Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Bound, Prometheus makes clear that fire is a symbol for all the creative elements of human civilization. Mary Shelley’s husband Percy Shelley wrote his Prometheus Unbound envisioning the triumph of the fiery rebel over the forces of political and religious tyranny. But Frankenstein is a warning: Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve was a promise that “Ye shall be as gods.” The light of reason can all too easily become the crazed glitter in the mad scientist’s eyes. The great Romantic poets and critics were not irrationalists, but they did reject the kind of rationalistic reductionism that masqueraded as reason but which was, as they rightly saw, really a disguised principle of restraint. In Blake’s mythology, the figure of false reason is Urizen, whose name suggests “reason” but also “horizon.” Urizen is a white-haired reactionary figure, sitting on his throne, passing laws attempting to limit any expression of energy or desire. He is opposed by Orc, a fiery-haired rebel who is the true Promethean figure whose “thought-creating” fires are the energy of sexual desire, political revolution, and art.
Romanticism was not the antagonist of the Enlightenment but its necessary Contrary. It was drawn to the darkness. I find that psychiatry has a name for the love of darkness, nyctophilia, and regards it as a disorder, with sexual implications, which strikes me as the kind of pathologizing of anything unconventional, in the name of social control, that Michel Foucault regarded as typical of the modern “helping” professions. Whatever it says about me, one of my favorite books is Loren Eiseley’s The Night Country (1971), in which, in an essay titled “The Places Below” he says: “Some in the world of light desire the darkness. I saw that then more clearly than before. The whole infinite ladder of life was filled with this backward yearning. There were the mammals who had given up the land and returned to the sea…I loved the darkness. I feared it, yet returned to it. It was the mother out of which I came” (26-27). Well, we can see what the psychiatrists are getting at. Yet it is the theme of Jung’s breakthrough book, rewritten as Symbols of Transformation (1956, original version 1912) that any creative psychological development requires a figurative breaking of the incest taboo and a return to the primordial sea of the unconscious, which is also the maternal womb. However, the return is not purely regressive, but rather a means to an end. We may grant the psychiatrists that any creative descent into the darkness of the unconscious is accompanied by a certain ambivalence. When Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born again of water and the spirit, Nicodemus was quite troubled by the idea of returning to his mother’s womb.
In 1800, the German poet Novalis published six Hymns to the Night inspired by the death, in 1797, of his beloved, whose name, Sophie, suggests Sophia, meaning “wisdom.” The third poem speaks of a dream-vision Novalis had in which Sophie’s grave became transparent, and “through the cloud I saw the transfigured features of my beloved” (17). He goes on to say that “since then I’ve felt an unchangeable, eternal faith in the heaven of Night and its Light, the beloved” (17).The hymns suggest a kind of Divine Comedy with the directions reversed: some critics claim that, like Dante’s commedia, they are threefold, falling into three groups of two. But Dante’s is ultimately an ascent quest, whereas Novalis’s goes in the other direction. The last poem is titled “Longing for Death” and begins, “Down into the earth’s womb, / Away from Light’s kingdoms…/ We’ve come in from a narrow boat” (39). That last line suggests the “night sea journey,” a phrase that Jung picked up from The Age of the Sun God (1904) by the ethnologist Leo Frobenius. It was a widespread mythical motif that the sun journeyed underground from its setting in the west to rise in the east again: Milton speaks of its “vacant interlunar caves” in Samson Agonistes, which, because of its blind hero, is full of imagery of light and darkness. Milton was the forebear of all the Romantics because, although he retained the traditional image of God on his throne on high, his real intuition of God was as an Inner Light that is the light of the spirit but also of the imagination that inspired his poetry. The invocations to that Inner Light are among the most moving parts of Paradise Lost, not least, of course, because, like his hero Samson, Milton was blind.
In 1957, Northrop Frye published a crucial essay called “New Directions from Old,” saying that in modern mythology, beginning with the Romantics, the direction of the heroic quest is downward, its goal the imagination itself symbolized as a light in the darkness, as a vision achieved through a descent journey. In his later career, Jung became fascinated with alchemy as a kind of key to archetypal symbolism. True alchemy—though there were many false varieties—was a form of meditation, akin to what Jung called “active imagination,” not a weirdly bad attempt at chemistry. The transformation of substances in a sealed vessel through heating, dissolving, and the like called forth projections from the alchemist’s imagination. The goal, the lapis or Philosopher’s Stone, was paradoxical: not just a material substance like gold, but not just an idea or mental image either, but rather an identification of mind and matter, spirit and substance, that represented a transcendence of the ordinary gap between subject and object. Achieving it involved a death-and-rebirth process that could be represented by various symbolism, but a common variety was the love-death union of a red king and a white queen, the offspring of that union being the Stone. It is like a Creation myth in reverse, a form of what I have in various places called decreation.
A stunning poem by John Donne called “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” employs the alchemical imagery of decreation to speak of a woman’s death, possibly his wife’s. St. Lucy’s Day is December 13, but more calendrical complexities are involved here: Donne makes clear that it is the winter solstice, now celebrated on December 21. St. Lucy, whose name means “light,” is the patron saint of vision. She was blinded in her martyrdom, and so is represented carrying her eyeballs in a dish, like something out of a surrealist painting. In the Divine Comedy, she is the intermediary between the Blessed Virgin and Beatrice in what I call the heavenly relay race of women determined to save the soul of Dante, who is lost in the darkness of the Wood of Error. James Joyce, another blind visionary with inward sight, named his daughter Lucia.
In the “Nocturnal,” the speaker says that the unnamed woman’s death has reduced him to nothing, but not to ordinary nothing: “If I an ordinary nothing were, / As shadow, a light and body must be here. / But I am none; nor will my sun renew.” A shadow is a nothing that nevertheless is generated by the presence of light and body. But Donne has been decreated to a state prior to the opposites of being and non-being: it is the “nothing” before the Creation itself. He says of Love: “He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” Because he has not merely died but been decreated, there is no rebirth for him in this life. Very much like Novalis in the Hymns, there is nothing (so to speak) left for him to do but follow his dead love to a transcendence beyond the realm of the opposites: “Let me prepare toward her,” he says. If this seems unclear, well, it is a dark and hermetic poem, a representation of the phase of the alchemical process known as the nigredo.
Is the poem merely nihilistic, a set of clever paradoxes whose ultimate point is no more than “I feel suicidal because my lover died”? Nihilism is indeed the temptation of the post-Romantic descent quest, as in the “white savior” Kurtz’s failed quest in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Much of Jungian “depth” psychology derives from Goethe’s Faust, whose plot begins with Mephistopheles saving Faust from a suicide attempt, eventually sending him on a descent quest to the mysterious realm of “the Mothers.” But what does all this symbolism mean in more accessible terms?
A gigantic collective shadow has arisen in modern history. It was defeated in 1945, but is rising again all over the world. The myths of our time know it, and represent it prophetically as Sauron, Voldemort, Darth Vader. It is a three-headed Cerberus: one head is fascism; another is false religion of various sorts, including Christian nationalism and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; the third is the ruthless, anti-democratic capitalism of the 1%.We have no choice but to enter the darkness and confront it. The imagination is the light in the darkness. Against the blindness of hatred and brute force it deploys that miraculous cure for blindness known as liberal education, especially education in the arts. Authoritarians, religious fanatics, and corrupt capitalists all hate liberal education, and for good reason. The imagination is also the basis of true religion, which these days may perhaps sooner be found in what Campbell calls "creative mythology” than in institutional religion. The books of Frye, Jung, Campbell, and Eliade have been for me a spiritual resource more valuable than any conventional religion. And against the plutocracy that uses income inequality as a means of destabilizing society and turning groups of people against each other so that they will not unite against their actual common enemy, we must continue to work for a kind of yin-yang hybrid of capitalism and socialism, “socialism” meaning in this context a combination of restraints against predatory laissez-faire and a strong social safety net. Liberal education, progressive spirituality, and a compassionate utopianism: none of this is impossible in the least.
But the form of the fourth is the imagination itself, and the imagination’s ultimate task is to question the limits of the possible, to re-imagine reality as what the Bible calls apocalypse, a word that means “revelation.” If we ask what is revealed, one answer is that we might discover that the supernatural light without and the imaginative light within are Contraries, forms of the same light, each cloaked in its necessary and imperfect darkness. Wallace Stevens, who in poems like “Sunday Morning” refused the comforts of conventional religion, nevertheless wrote, “We say God and the imagination are one. / How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
This is not mystical, not intellectual, not difficult. It is expressed in an old Appalachian hymn, in a form that is as simple as it is profound:
Bright morning stars arising Bright morning stars arising Bright morning stars arising Day is breaking in my soul
The hymn has more verses, but in fact this quiet, radiant quatrain is revelation enough.
References
Eiseley, Loren. The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Novalis. Hymns to the Night. 3rd Edition. Translated by Dick Higgins. McPherson & Company, 1988.