Underworld All-Nighters

for the most miraculous time of the year

Certain things grow in the darkness:
Dreams, babies, roots.

Marion Woodman

The year is getting tired, curling up by a cozy fire and the new one is already knocking on our doors, wanting to be let in.

But before that can happen, we need to pass through tonight’s solar still-point and receive - requiring our openness - what reflections and insights it may have to offer: about this past year and about our growth and transformation through it, about the movements of the collective and the communities we belong to, and about the particular stars by which we each navigate into the next year.

The solstice time, also Christmas time, marks the re-birth of the Sun and life-cycles here on Earth, with consciousness moving in unison. And each re-birth is truly miraculous: watching how new life will spring from dead-looking twigs, I never tire, never cease to be surprised. And this change begins here, interestingly, during the longest night of the year, when nothing seems to be moving, and nothing more wanting to move within us, either.

Alchemical Undertakings

As the ancient precursor to modern-day chemistry and pharmacy, alchemy was essentially the study of transformation, and transformation is not possible without a phase of darkness. (think: cocooning, hibernation, sleep, pregnancy, also mystical seclusion)

We begin with what’s given - the everyday, the mundane, the common (alchemically symbolized by stone). Through the alchemical process, we seek to find the healing potential in the mundane, to make the everyday sacred, and materially speaking, of turning the given into gold (see also: water into wine). This process goes through several phases of transformation, the essential one being called the blackening. During the blackening phase, what we have in front of us must be substantially broken down, decomposed, dissolved, until all that’s left is black matter. Only then can it be transformed into something new.

Ultimately, the purpose of these early chemical experiments was the search for eternal life.

In his writing “L’Azoth des philosophes”, Basilius Valentinus describes the process of transformation in this maxim:

enter the underworld
and through purification
you shall find the hidden stone

The Latin original reads:

visita interiora terrae
rectificando
invenies occultum lapidem

This Latin maxim was abbreviated to spell V.I.T.R.I.O.L., naming the substance Vitriol, which happens highly corrosive in its nature. (The word itself has thus taken on a whole different meaning in our common speech.)

Depth psychologists recognize that our mental and psychic transformation processes follow this exact same protocol. But the insight that darkness is needed for transformation is ancient, and all myth speaks of it.