Black Man

The sociological vogues all have forgotten that The Black Man is also Thanatos. As we saw above, the inhabitants of the netherworld in Egypt were black, and in Rome they were called injeri and umbrae.

Hillman argues that reductive sociological readings of the Black Man in dreams obscure the figure’s primary archetypal identity as Thanatos and denizen of the underworld, a dimension consistently suppressed by both Jungian convention and cultural projection.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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Concerning black in dreams, I would like to bypass both the richness of color symbolism, and the many notions already explored in religious mysticism about darkness and alchemical symbolism about the nigredo, in order to restrict myself to black persons in dreams. It is a Jungian convention to take these black

Hillman signals his critical departure from standard Jungian shadow-reading by isolating black persons as dream figures deserving their own hermeneutic, distinct from color symbolism or nigredo allegory.

Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis

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It turns out that the black man has no malicious intentions. What is frightening the dreamer is his own prejudice regarding blacks. This specific black man appears to be different from the way he is in the dreamer’s prejudiced view.

Bosnak demonstrates through clinical dreamwork that fear of the Black Man in dreams is generated by the dreamer’s cultural prejudice rather than any inherent menace in the figure, and that suspending that prejudice allows the figure to speak for itself.

Bosnak, Robert, A Little Course in Dreams, 1986thesis

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The Moor or Ethiopian is the black, sinful man, whom St. Hilary (d. 367) compared to the raven. In the Chymical Wedding there is a black king, and in Schema XXIV Mylius represents the relation of king and queen under the symbol of two ravens fighting.

Jung situates the Black Man within the alchemical tradition as the Moor or Ethiopian, a figure of sinfulness and prima materia whose beheading and transformation constitute a central operation of the opus.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis

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Becoming blacker than black would also bear upon the chaos and tragedy of what are misnamed ‘race’ relations and are more truly color relations because they are reflections in the human sphere of alchemical processes whose intentions only peripherally concern people.

Hillman contends that racial conflict is a manifestation in the human sphere of alchemical color dynamics, and that an archetypal psychology of blackness — becoming ‘blacker than black’ — is prerequisite to genuinely addressing the nigredo underlying racism.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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The negative and primitive definition of black promotes the moralization of the black-white pair. Black, then, is defined as not white and is deprived of all the virtues attributed to white. Northern European and American racism may have begun in the moralization of color terms.

Hillman traces the ideological roots of racism to the philosophical privative definition of black as not-white, arguing that Western color moralization preceded and enabled racial hierarchy.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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In came another very beautiful old man dressed in white, and this was the Black Magician. He wanted to speak to the White Magician but, seeing the young man there, hesitated. Then the White Magician immediately explained that the young man was ‘an innocent,’ and that the Black Magician could speak quite freely before him.

Jung presents the Black Magician as a paradoxical figure — robed in white, deeply wise — whose discourse with the White Magician models the psyche’s need to integrate opposing spiritual forces rather than moralize them.

Jung, C.G., Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, 1989supporting

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He dreamed he was standing in the presence of a sublime hieratic figure called the ‘white magician,’ who was nevertheless clothed in a long black robe. This magician had just ended a lengthy discourse with the words ‘And fo’

Jung’s clinical example of the white magician in black robes illustrates how the archetype of spirit confounds simple color-moral oppositions, dressing spiritual authority in the very color associated with darkness and shadow.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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The whole idea of race is conceptual, something we are all stuck with. How James Hillman broke it down made so much sense.

Malidoma Somé’s response to Hillman’s Buffalo Gap address attests that Hillman’s deconstruction of race as a conceptual rather than ontological category had genuine cross-cultural resonance.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting

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black-white encounters beyond black-or-white categories… ‘a vastly different picture of the Black male’… father ‘in full power as black Othello’

Russell’s index entries document the range of Hillman’s engagements with Blackness — historical, literary, and psychological — showing the scope of his attempt to move beyond binary racial categories.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting

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Black stands for crude matter, the ‘prima materia,’ lead, and Osiris’ body when in the underworld. European and Egyptian alchemists’ associations around black are very close to the Africans’.

Bly aligns cross-cultural symbolic readings of black — Ndembu, European, and alchemical — to ground the color’s association with death, underworld passage, and raw transformative matter.

Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting

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Fidi Mkullu said to Kadifukke, ‘I am white, you are black.’ Frobenius, who took down this story, says that people do not understand this last sentence.

Von Franz introduces an African dual-creator myth in which the black-white opposition marks cosmological difference rather than moral hierarchy, underscoring the cross-cultural primacy of color opposition in mythic thought.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995aside

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Black is itself not a paradigm, but a paradigm breaker. That is why it is placed as a phase within a process of colors, and why it appears again and again, in life and in work, in order to deconstruct (solve et coagula) what has become an identity.

Hillman argues that black functions alchemically not as a stable identity but as a recurring solvent of fixed identities, making the Black Man as symbol an agent of dissolution rather than a settled archetype.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside

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