Light And Darkness

Light and Darkness constitutes one of the most architecturally significant polarities in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmological myth, phenomenological description of inner experience, and ontological framework for the opposites structuring psychic life. The tradition speaks with multiple, sometimes competing voices. Jung employs the polarity dialectically: consciousness is not simply light triumphant over darkness but is produced together with the unconscious at a single moment, each term requiring and generating the other. Hillman radicalizes this into a critique of any evolutionary narrative in which light displaces darkness, insisting that ego-consciousness concentrates and thereby darkens what was originally a divine twilight. Corbin’s Iranian Sufi sources complicate the dualism further by positing a ‘black light’—a luminous darkness surpassing ordinary consciousness rather than opposing it, situated above the visible field rather than below. Against these phenomenological readings, Jonas’s account of Gnostic and Manichaean cosmology presents Light and Darkness as co-eternal, warring hypostases whose conflict is the engine of cosmic history and individual salvation. Edinger reads this myth psychologically: the capture of Light by Darkness models the entrapment of soul in matter and the necessity of redemptive consciousness. Across all positions the polarity raises the same irreducible tension: whether darkness is privation, precondition, or transcendence.

In the library 25 passages

We may not speak therefore of an evolutionary process of light emerging from darkness, an extension of light at the expense of darkness. The light is not stolen from the dark where there is privation of light; rather the ego concentrates into one pole the divine primordial half-light, thereby also darkening the divine.

Hillman argues that consciousness and the unconscious are co-produced from a primordial twilight, making any narrative of progressive enlightenment psychologically untenable.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

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the day of consciousness is on a plane intermediate between the luminous Night of superconsciousness and the dark Night of unconsciousness. The divine Darkness, the Cloud of unknowing, the ‘Darkness at the approaches to the Pole,’ the ‘Night of symbols’ through which the soul makes its way, is definitely not the Darkness in which the particles of light are held captive.

Corbin establishes a tripartite schema in which a divine or supraconscious darkness stands above ordinary consciousness, categorically distinct from the infernal darkness below.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis

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This divine darkness does not refer therefore to the lower darkness, that of the black body, the infraconsciousness, but to the black Heavens, the black Light in which the ipseity of the Deus absconditus is pre-sensed by the superconsciousness.

Corbin distinguishes an upper divine darkness—the black Light of the hidden God—from the lower darkness of matter, requiring a metaphysics of light grounded in mystical experience.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis

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The two realms are co-eternal as regards the past: they have no origin but are themselves the origins… the Light, far from considering the existence of Darkness as a challenge, wants nothing but the separateness and has neither benevolent nor ambitious tendency to enlighten its opposite.

Jonas articulates the Manichaean cosmological dualism in which Light and Darkness are co-eternal, self-sufficient principles whose tragic entanglement is the origin of cosmic history.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958thesis

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Primal Man was assigned the task of defending the world of Light against the aggressor, the world of Darkness… the attack stopped. But it was stopped at the price of having the Light substance captured by Matter.

Edinger reads the Manichaean myth psychologically as a model for the soul’s entrapment in matter and the consequent necessity of redemptive consciousness-work.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995thesis

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Man in Ibn ‘Arabl’s anthropogony is likewise intermediate: situated between being and non-being, between Light and Darkness, at the same time responsible and respondent to both sides; he is responsible for the Darkness to the extent that he intercepts the Light.

Corbin presents Ibn ‘Arabi’s anthropology as placing the human being at the ontological threshold between Light and Darkness, making humanity both witness to and co-responsible for each principle.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis

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The colored photisms of pure light thus described correspond to the state of the heart which is that of the ‘pacified soul.’ The colored photisms which Najm Razi proceeds to describe rise step by step from the moment when the spiritual individuality is triumphantly freed from the lower ego.

Corbin details how Iranian Sufi masters map the spectrum from darkness to black light as a graduated phenomenology of spiritual individuation marked by visionary colored photisms.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis

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The light that is lighted in the heart by the grace of the Holy Spirit, that same light of nature, however feeble it may be, is more important to them than the great light which shines in the darkness and which the darkness comprehended not. They discover that in the very darkness of nature a light is

Jung, following Paracelsus, identifies a ‘light of nature’ within darkness itself as the vital secret of psychological transformation, distinct from theological illumination.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis

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the stage of the arcanum (Jesus) is luminous black (aswad nurani); this is the ‘black light,’ the luminous Night about which we were informed by Najm RazI as well as by the Rose Garden of Mystery.

Corbin maps the Iranian Sufi system of seven subtle centers onto a graduated chromatic spirituality in which the highest attainable stage short of the divine center is precisely the ‘black light.’

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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According to whether what appears to you is light or darkness, your witness (shahid) is light or darkness… its role is therefore to indicate whether there is excess or deficiency in the spiritual state, that is, whether light prevails over darkness or vice versa.

Corbin shows how light and darkness function as diagnostic indicators of the soul’s spiritual condition, with the heavenly ‘witness’ or guide made visible or concealed accordingly.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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it is the fratricidal strife of Darkness that inevitably leads to its first beholding of Light, and that this beholding in turn leads to the terrible union of its divided forces, seems to be Mani’s original and ingenious contribution to the doctrine.

Jonas identifies Mani’s distinctive contribution as the narrative logic by which Darkness’s internal conflict generates its first perception of Light, triggering the cosmic drama.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958supporting

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Later Iranian Sufi masters refer to the Night of light, the dark Noontide, the black Light. And in the Manichean faith it is the flames of the aurora borealis that are visualized in the Columna gloriae as composed of all the particles of Light reascending from the infernum to the Earth of light.

Corbin situates the paradoxical imagery of black light and the luminous night within a shared Iranian-Manichaean cosmological framework oriented toward a celestial north as locus of reascent.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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The luminous face, the face of day, is the only one that, without understanding it, the common run of men perceive… Their black face, the one the mystic perceives, is their poverty: they have nothing with which to be.

Corbin explicates the mystical double face of being—a luminous face visible to ordinary consciousness and a dark face of inessential contingency visible only to the mystic.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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The sight of its darkness is itself an illumination, a widening of consciousness through integration of the hitherto unconscious components of the personality.

Jung inverts the conventional association by arguing that the confrontation with the shadow’s darkness is itself a form of illumination, linking the polarity directly to the individuation process.

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

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the sun transmits the Light to the Light above it in the world of praise, and it goes on in that world until it arrives at the highest and pure Light. The sun does not cease to do this until nothing of the parts of Light is left in this world.

Jonas describes the Manichaean cosmic soteriology as a continuous process of light-particles being filtered upward through celestial mechanisms until all light is redeemed from matter.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958supporting

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the lower half signifies the ‘everlasting darkness’ that ‘extends into the fire,’ while the upper, ‘salnitrous’ half corresponds to the third Principle, the ‘visible, elemental world, which is an emanation of the first and other Principle.’

Jung draws on Böhme’s divided mandala to articulate a spatial ontology in which light and darkness correspond to upper and lower halves of a symbolic totality.

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

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what if the man of light fails to maintain his effort and falls victim to the Darkness, what if Phos is finally captured and overcome by the earthly, carnal Adam?

Corbin raises the eschatological stakes of the light-darkness polarity by asking what happens when the spiritual individual succumbs to darkness, grounding the cosmic drama in individual moral and spiritual responsibility.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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either the soul-consciousness is not freed from its shadow, the nafs ammara, but looks at it and through it, thus seeing nothing but shadow, its shadow; or else the shadow has subsided and the soul has risen to the degree of nafs motma’yanna and sees its own dimension of light.

Corbin articulates the Sufi phenomenology of light and shadow as a binary spiritual diagnostic: the soul either remains enthralled to its lower nature and sees only shadow, or is liberated and perceives its own luminous dimension.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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There is indeed affinity and correspondence between physical colors and auric colors, in the sense that physical colors themselves have a moral and spiritual quality and that what the aura expresses corresponds to it, ‘symbolizes with it.’

Corbin grounds the Iranian Sufi phenomenology of light in a theory of correspondence between physical and suprasensory color, enabling a systematic discrimination between spiritual states.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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‘De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine’—this cry demonstrates both, the remoteness and the nearness, the outermost darkness and the dazzling spark of the Divine.

Jung reads the cry of dereliction on the Cross as the experiential coincidence of utmost darkness and divine spark, making the polarity intrinsic to the drama of incarnation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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on the trumpets of pursuit they shall write ‘God’s Smiting All the Sons of Darkness — His Anger Will Not Turn Back until They Are Destroyed.’

Campbell documents the Dead Sea Scrolls’ War Scroll as a concrete mythological-historical expression of the light-darkness dualism institutionalized as an eschatological military doctrine.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting

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When it prevails for some period (i.e., that darkness), open your eyes at once and see [that] outside also there must be darkness. If darkness prevails outside also, then you are Bhairava, you have entered in the state of Bhairava.

The Vijnana Bhairava presents a contemplative method in which the attainment of total interior darkness, verified by its extension into the perceived exterior, marks the realization of the divine Bhairava-state.

Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting

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Making the Darkness Conscious… A Play of Light and Dark

Peterson’s chapter headings signal that his study is organized around the Jungian dialectic of shadow-integration and the interplay of light and darkness as structuring metaphors.

Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024aside

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consciousness is excluded because it is too bright… sometimes these may kill growth in the psyche by pulling out something which is not yet ready for the light.

Von Franz warns that premature illumination—too much analytical light applied too soon—can arrest rather than foster psychic growth, inverting the usual valorization of consciousness.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, 1998aside

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