Glass Beads of Light
The Black Bead Game
For example, in the Considerations
piece of Chris Cameron:
The Black Bead Game
Von Franz,
archetypes: Black & White - p. 48; Sphere - p. 39.
Bly, Robert, Iron John,
Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1991,. For BLACK, RED and WHITE.
Edinger - Mortificatio and other Maps
Hillman, James, The Seduction of Black,
Spring 61,
Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques, A Vanishing Problem, in: Kitagawa, Joseph
M. and Long, Charles H. (eds.) Myths and Symbols, Studies in Honor of Mircea
Eliade,
Nigredo
What is the realtionship
between these three Alchemical terms. I would suggest it is one of sequence.
For example - Death precedes Putrefaction. So:
1. MORTE
2. PUTRE
3. NIGRE
- is the colour that is associated with both these 'states'.
And so forth.
BLACK DEATH,… plague, in
Narcissus and Goldmund -
For BLACK
It is extremely interesting that
one of the oldest Egyptian Gods, Min of Koptos was painted black. Lurker:
"Images
of MIN, the god of fertility and especially of generation, were painted with a
mixture of fine resin and carbon dust in accordance with ancient ritual."
[Lurker on BLACK, p.34.]
To the Egyptians, says Lurker,
black:
"...was
a reference to death and the netherworld but, at the same time, to
rebirth."
Lurker, Manfred, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient
Egypt.An Illutrated Dictionary,
We would also add here:
PLUTONIC The God of the Underworld
SUBTERRANEAN Beneath the Earth
UNDERWORLD Under the Worlds
HADES The Locality
HELL Extremely Subjective and Emotional States
INFERNO Burning and Fire
COLOUR BLACK
KHEM
In
this picture (27) Oneiros is a main figure. He is the god of dreams, who
reveals truth by deceit. The motif of truth and falsehood may have been
connected with Bacchic mystery creeds. In favour of such an interpretation, one
might point out, too, that a symbolism of black and white seems to unite
several pictures: The horses of Oeomaus are black, those of Pelops and
Amphiaraos white. Oneiros wears a white cloak over a black garment.
Lehmann-Hartleben,
Karl , The Imagines of
the Elder Philostratus, The Art Bulletin, 23, No. 1. March 1941, p. 36,
Note 56.
The nocturnal black of certain attenuated
backgrounds generates and dishes up and agitates these ghosts made of
Indian-ink eyes. "Obscurity, caverns in which everything can arise, everything
must be searched for. (..)Everything that it is important to know is in black,
and it was in night that humanity was formed, in its first age, and lived, in
the Middle Ages". Black, as an a-chromatic ruse for detaching oneself from
night, in the illusion of rediscovering the origin: "I paint black
-hermetically black - backgrounds. Black is my crystal ball. Only from black do
I see life emerge". And then, in Emergences-Resurgences: "The
colours laid on almost by chance have become apparitions... that come out of
night. / Reaching black. Black takes one back to the foundation, to the origin.
/ Base of deep emotions. From night emerges the unexplained, the non-detailed,
the non-traceable to visible causes, the surprise attack, mystery, religion, fear...
and the monsters, those that appear out of nothing, not from a
mother". Claire Stoullig, in the
catalogue of the exhibition at the Musee Rath in