Colors of the Soul - A Review of James Hillman’s Alchemical Psychology

Excerpt - Stanton Marlan

In a new addition to his alchemical reflections, Hillman turns to the images of the work, to the rudiments of fuel and fire, to heat and the vessels of alchemy. It has long been held that the art of fire is a key to and basis of the alchemical work of hastening nature. Psychologically for Hillman this “means learning how to warm, excite, enthuse, ignite, inspire the material at hand” (20). Fire also needs limitation and direction and the vessels of alchemy provide the shapes of imaginal containment.

Psyche’s need for containment and stability is then imagined through the image of salt. It is in life’s hurts, wounds, humiliations, in its “blood, sweat, and tears,” in “The Suffering of Salt,” that we find the qualities essential to embodiment. It is in these experiences that life events are sensed and felt. This makes personal experience possible while, at the same time, marking out the impersonal ground of psychic life. It is in our salt-ladened experiences that, in the right measure, we can find and extract both eros and wisdom. From this salty base, Hillman aesthetically organizes the majority of his study of alchemical psychology around a rainbow of colors: black, blue, silver/white, yellow, and, finally, red, intrinsic to the azure vault, an image of the “final” realization of the alchemical 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.” The blacker than black aspect of this condition brings with it the dread of nonbeing, but it also is the “ungrounded ground of possibility.” As black despair moves toward reflection, black turns to blue and imagination penetrates the darkness. Psyche“ponders and considers” as it moves toward the albedo, a silvery white condition of the soul characterized by lunafication and lustration, a gleaming white condition, the white earth as the archetypal basis of psychic life and what Hillman calls the poetic basis of mind.