Member-only story
The Opus
For Hillman, color imagery indicates both the stages of alchemical work as well as independent states of soul. His analysis leans away from developmental and progressivist interpretations of individuation and toward a co-presence of aesthetic fields. In the fantasy of stages, blackness is often thought of as an early stage of the work. The soul of the alchemist finds itself in a dark place, a nigredo, “constricted, anguished.” In Hillman’s reflection on the “seduction of black,” however, there is far more to be appreciated about blackness. For the alchemist, blackness is also an accomplishment, and in it Hillman sees black’s intentionality, deepening the soul, teaching endurance, and, perhaps most important, serving to deconstruct positivities and paradigms, halting the exaggerated “fervor of salt,” and overcoming the fundamentalisms of “hopefully colored illusions.”
…In “The Yellowing of the Work,” Hillman describes this important transitional process of putrefaction, decay, and rot, necessary to a reddening into a fuller life. Yellowing saves us from the whiteness and abstractions of psychological insight, what he sees as the continuing translation of experience into bloodless concepts. For our work to approach the highest level, it must reach the world, deconstruct and spoil itself, develop a “jaundiced eye” to the whiteness of psychology. Yellowing moves us toward these potentialities and brings both the decay and…
