The transformation of history begins in the soul as a destruction of what time has wrought. It is an operation of the senex upon the senex: the nigredo experience of the depression and rottening of the mind filled with accumulated time. Alchemy says how this work proceeds: "The divine organ is the head, for it is the abode of the divine part, namely the soul ..." and the philosopher must "surround this organ with greater care than other organs." [5] In the nigredo the brain turns black. Thus a Hermes recipe cited in the Rosarium says: "Take the brain ... grind it up with very strong vinegar, or with boys' urine, until it turns black." The darkening or benightedness is at the same time a psychic state called melancholia (black bile). In the Aurelia occulta there is a passage where the transformation substance in the nigredo state says of itself: > I am an infirm and weak old man, surnamed the dragon; therefore I am shut up in a cave, that I be ransomed by the kingly crown ... A fiery sword inflicts great torments upon me; death makes weak my flesh and bones ... My soul and my spirit depart; a terrible poison, I am likened to the black raven, for that is the wages of sin; in dust and earth I lie. [6] From the senex viewpoint, our complexities cannot altogether be elucidated, led into light, even if therapy believes that the process of individuation gradually increases consciousness. That our complexities become clearer may mean that we have lost touch with their darkness, the fundamental impenetrability of the other side at their core. The antidote is not extracted from poison, since the poison and the antidote are one and the same thing. The snake that heals is the same snake whose bite kills; there are no "good" snakes and "bad" snakes; there is but one snake, even in Paradise. Besides, with every extraction of kindliness from wickedness, of light from darkness, the old residual stuff becomes denser. In alchemy, the poisonous portion of the complex remaining after its goodness had been separated out became the new nigredo, the substance for the next transformation. The new work was on the old remainder, the lead, the raven, the black sludge left over. If alchemy is a "therapy," then the focus to which its operation returns again and again is the senex component of the complex. Here, is the stubborn poison. Therapy in this sense becomes a working on Saturn, a depressive grinding of the most recalcitrant encrustations of the complex, its oldest habits, which are neither childhood remnants nor parental introjections but senex phenomena, that is, the structure and principles by which the complex endures. Fundamental in this structure is its double nature, so no experience can possibly be only beneficial. Even the moments of kindly and benign wisdom concoct a new toxin. The fear of the poison and the wickedness of the old wise man is not only a heuristic caution. This fear is also a true recognition of the nature of wisdom, its Saturn aspect. For the alchemical operations on Saturn the operator and the material operated upon must be in sympathetic rapport, i. e., under the same archetypal constellation. One works on the blackened mind with the sour vinegar and residual salts of youth left behind. Depression would be the prerequisite for working on anything belonging to the senex. Consciousness itself must be blackened before one can approach this nigredo.
— James Hillman
Hillman is not offering a method for getting through depression. He is insisting that depression is the method — that the blackening of consciousness is not a preparatory phase to be managed but the actual substance of the work itself. The alchemical recipe is brutal precisely because it needs to be: grind the brain with vinegar, with the residual salts of what youth left behind. The nigredo is not a threshold you cross to reach clarity; it is the operation.
This cuts directly against the assumption that therapy's purpose is to extract the useful from the toxic, to separate the kindly wisdom from the wickedness and discard the remainder. Hillman points out what that remainder becomes: denser, darker, a new nigredo — the next material to be worked. Every successful extraction manufactures its own poison. There is no final purification because the poison and the antidote are the same substance viewed from different angles in the same moment.
What this means practically is that the senex component of a complex — its oldest habits, the encrustations that have survived every previous round of insight — cannot be approached from outside its own archetypal register. You cannot work on Saturn from a cheerful altitude. The operator and the material must be under the same constellation: one must already be in the blackened state to approach the blackened material. Depression here is not pathology to be remedied but the necessary epistemological condition for this particular knowledge. Wisdom carries Saturn in it; that fear is not irrational caution but accurate recognition.
James Hillman·Senex & Puer·2015