For most depth psychologists, the journey to the underworld is for the purpose of a return to life as, one hopes, a more integrated self, but for Hillman this does not go far enough. The return of the repressed still does not address the deeper meaning of "death itself" and the underworld psyche.39 Hades as a figure of his concern reflects a

"the black paintings are icons without iconography. They function like the hypnotic patterns of the abstract diagrams of tantric Buddhism: they induce a state of contemplation which may be defined as meditative.... The black paintings, although not specifically `religious,' are an effort to retrieve the dimension of the spiritual in a secular

The starred heaven is then equated by Lopez-Pedraza with the alchemical scintillae, the first appearance of the soul, thesparks of light in the dark sky that for Jung reflected the multiple centers of the psyche in the darkness of the unconscious.

It is the paradox of the nigredo that I have painted-the conjunction of light and dark, growth and decay, mystery and revelation, the unconscious and conscious. These paintings arevisualizations of the void-a black abyss which contains everything and nothing."'

All of these reveal what Jung calls the light of darkness itself, an expression of the alchemist's lumen naturae.

We have already discussed Jung's idea that in alchemy, when light and darkness and male and female come together, the filius philosophorum is born.

Jung notes that "the tree [in general] symbolizes a living process as well as a process of enlight

Staying with the darkness allows something to happen that escapes us if we are hasty. If we resist our natural tendency to take flight before painful experiences, we can descend into the dark aspects of the unconscious, which is necessary if we are to make contact with what Goethe calls "infinite nature"' Turning toward such darkness requires a

Such images reflect an archetypal moment when we stand on the threshold of our individuation and wonder whether going forward is going to lead to our demise.