quarta-feira, 16 de dezembro de 2020

O Sol Negro, a Luz da Escuridão, Jung e a Psicologia Profunda: Exemplo Textual

 

Marlan, S., 2005, The Black Sun: The alchemy and art of darkness,11-2.

  Jung’s exploration was influenced by the seventeenth-century alchemist Mylius, who refers to the ancient philosophers as the source of our knowledge about Sol niger. In several places in his collected works, Jung writes of Sol niger as a powerful and important image of the unconscious. To consider the image in the context of the unconscious is both to recognize its vastness and unknown quality as well as to place it in the historical context of depth psychology and of the psyche’s attempt to represent the unrepresentable. Imagining Sol niger in this way is to see it in its most general sense, but Jung has also extracted from the alchemical literature a rich and complex, if scattered, phenomenology of the image. The black sun, blackness, putrefactio, mortificatio, the nigredo, poisoning, torture, killing, decomposition, rotting, and death all form a web of interrelationships that describe a terrifying, if most often provisional, eclipse of consciousness or of our conscious standpoint. 

  The nigredo, the initial black stage of the alchemical opus, has been considered the most negative and difficult operation in alchemy. It is also one of the most numinous, but few authors other than Jung have explored the theme in its many facets. In addition to the aspects just described, Jung also finds in this image of blackness a nonmanifest latency, a shadow of the sun, as well as an Other Sun, linked to both Saturn and Yahweh, the primus anthropos. For the most part, Sol niger is equated with and understood only in its nigredo aspect, while its more sublime dimension—its shine, its dark illumination, its Eros and wisdom— remains in the unconscious. 

  I imagine my work on the black sun as an experiment in alchemical psychology. It is concerned with this difficult and enigmatic image and with our understanding of darkness. My contention is that darkness historically has not been treated hospitably and that it has remained in the unconscious and become a metaphor for it. It has been seen primarily in its negative aspect and as a secondary phenomenon, itself constituting a shadow—something to integrate, to move through and beyond. In so doing, its intrinsic importance is often passed over. This attitude has also been perpetuated in alchemy, which places darkness at the beginning of the work and sees it primarily in terms of the nigredo. Yet in its usage of the black sun there is a hint of a darkness that shines. It is this shine of the paradoxical image that captures my attention. How is it possible to imagine a darkness filled with light or a shine that contains the qualities of both light and darkness? 

  Jung has noted that darkness “has its own peculiar intellect and its own logic which should be taken very seriously,” and it is my intent to give darkness its due—not to rush beyond it but to enter its realm to learn more about its mysteries. To turn toward darkness in this way is an odd reversal of our ordinary propensity. To more fully understand the turn toward darkness it is first important to pause and consider how much the historical primacy of light has infused our understanding of consciousness itself. 

  The image of light and its corresponding metaphor of the sun are fundamentally intertwined with the history of consciousness. Our language demonstrates the pervasiveness of these images, and it is difficult to envision a way of thinking that does not rely on them. In myth, science, philosophy, religion, and alchemy we find these metaphors widely disseminated. Our language is filled with metaphors of illumination: to bring to light, to make clear, to enlighten, and so on, all serve in these and in many other contexts.



Marlan, S., 2005, The Black Sun: The alchemy and art of darkness. College Station: Texas A & M University Press.

sexta-feira, 11 de dezembro de 2020

A Lua, a Deusa Selene, os Carros Celestes, a Fertilidade e os Casamentos: Exemplo Textual


Ní Mheallaigh, K., 2020, The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and Philosophy13-5.

The image of the celestial deities Helios and Selene traversing the sky either on horseback (usually Selene) or driving a horse-drawn chariot (usually Helios) was ubiquitous in ancient visual culture. Their mobility –they are always in transit– emphasized their inseparable connection withthe passage of time. The most conspicuous of the images that survive, arguably, are Pheidias’ sculptures of the birth of Athena on the eastern pediment of the Parthenon in Athens (428BC–432BC), which showed Helios’ chariot springing up over the eastern horizon, while on the otherside Selene’s tired horses sank over the west. This traditional imagery also infiltrated private spaces on cups and jars, objects whose circular shape androtation could re-enact the motions of the celestial deities, as Squire has argued for Tabula 4N. Although never regarded as one of the major Greek gods, Selene was identified with other goddesses such as Artemis and Hecate and Aphrodite of the Heavens. She was also worshipped in more intimate, domestic settings, on which level her importance was probably pervasive.

The Moon’s phases were critical markers for religious worship of many different sorts. Religious festivals tended to cluster around the full Moon, no doubt in order to avail of the light it offered for nocturnal celebrations; in the eighteenth century, similarly, the learned society of the ‘Lunar Men’would hold their monthly meetings on the same evening in order to take advantage of precisely these conditions. It is for this reason that a Greek epigrammatist hails the Moon as‘Selene, friend of all-night festivals’, and a fragment of Sappho’s poetry describes women gathering around an altar at full Moon (‘the Moon appeared full,/ and they stood around an altar...’). As we shall shortly see, this was likely to have been the occasion for the ritual that was celebrated in one of Alcman’s enigmatic Spartan songs as well. The new Moon was also important for a variety of purposes, e.g. the collection of debts, while both new and full Moon were considered propitious for weddings: in the case of the full Moon, probably because of the implications of fertility, while the new Moon was significant for marking the transition from an old cycle to the new. These associations conspired to make the‘old and new Moon’in theOdyssey a particularly ominous time for the return of Odysseus to his household, bringing with him the exaction of debts, the transition from the old regimeto the new and the reunion of husband and wife.



Ní Mheallaigh, K., 2020, The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

segunda-feira, 23 de novembro de 2020

Cheque Oferta: Natal 2020

 


Neste Natal e com estes tempos incertos, ofereça a quem precise de orientação uma Consulta de Astrologia ou Tarot.


Dadas as Consultas Presenciais estarem suspensas, a consulta será realizada à distância através de Skype, Google Meet ou Zoom.


O Cheque Oferta tem uma Validade de 6 meses, estando a consulta sujeita a disponibilidade de agenda e a marcação.




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Uma Consulta Profissional para Qualquer Parte do Mundo.


quinta-feira, 19 de novembro de 2020

Cardano, a Dignidade e Influência Astrológica e o Espírito Crítico: Exemplo Textual


Ernst, G. 2001, “ ‘Veritatis amor dulcissimus’: Aspects of Cardano’s Astrology” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, 48-9.

  Cardano felt compelled to admit that the situation was genuinely difficult and that the critics of astrology had it all too easy. The discipline had in fact been discredited and corrupted, and by its own practitioners. Cardano condemned not the art, but the artisans: they were the ones who failed to bring to its study the attention, effort, and mental profundity a discipline of its nobility and difficulty required. Moved either by greed or by ambition, they claimed to possess knowledge that they did not have and promised to give answers that an astrologer could not provide. They continually invented new expedients, taking shameless advantage of the ambiguous and profitable area of “elections and interrogations.” One particularly greedy and ignorant astrologer, for example, had forced Ludovico Sforza to follow minute rules, even making him and his courtiers ride horseback in rain and mud. 

   Astrology, Cardano admitted, was not an “absolutely precise” form of knowledge, endowed with absolute certainty and rigor. But that did not mean that it was “a superstition, a form of prophecy, magic, vanity, an oracle or a presage.” It was a natural, conjectural art that set out to formulate probable judgments about future events. There was no reason to deny the legitimacy of doing so, especially when it was granted to doctors, sailors, farmers, and miners. 

   The one basic presupposition on which astrology rested was the reality of the influence that the celestial bodies exercised on the sublunary world.These influences, obvious in the case of the sun and the moon, which werethe supreme rulers of the life of the universe, undeniably also belonged by extension to the planets and the stars, which had the same basic nature. Cardano discussed the question of these influences at length. He tried bothto prove their existence, with a plethora of examples, and to identify the paths by which they were propagated and the ways in which they affected the sublunary world. Only repeated observations could provide the basis for a body of theory as elaborate as that of Ptolemy, which could be confirmed, enlarged, and corrected in its turn by the observation of further facts.



Ernst, G. 2001, “ ‘Veritatis amor dulcissimus’: Aspects of Cardano’s Astrology” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. W. R. Newman & A. Grafton, 39-68. Cambridge, MA/ Londres: The MIT Press.

quarta-feira, 28 de outubro de 2020

Saturno e a Melancolia - A Origem das Qualidades Saturninas: Exemplo Textual

 


Klibansky, R., E. Panofsky & F. Saxl, 1979, Saturn and Melancholy,137-8.


The Greeks at first developed the planetary doctrine transmitted to them in classical times in a purely scientific direction. In this, an astrophysical viewpoint seems from the beginning to have been adopted simultaneously with the purely astronomical. 

Epigenes of Byzantium, who is thought to have lived in early Alexandrian times and therefore to have been one of the oldest mediators between Babylon and Hellas, classified Saturn as "cold and windy". The epithet "cold", according both with the planet's great distance from the sun and with the god's great age adhered to Saturn throughout the years and was never questioned. The property of dryness, implied by "windy", on the other hand, came into conflict with the fact that Pythagorean and Orphic texts described the mythical Kronos as just the opposite, namely, as the god of rain or of the sea; and this accounts for the fact that in later, especially in astrological literature, we so often encounter the singular definition "natura frigida et sicca, sed accidentaliter humida", or something of the sort - a contradiction which can only be explained, if at all, with the help of laborious argumentation. 

Whether it was really Posidonius who reduced the elemental qualities of the planets to an orderly system, we would not venture to decide, but it would be safe to say that it was, within the framework of the Stoic system that the doctrine was efldowed with its full meaning. Not till the formation of a cosmological system in which the opposites heat and cold determined the basic structure of the universe, did the qualities hitherto more or less arbitrarily tributed to the stars reveal a general and universally applicable law of nature, valid for both heavenly and earthly things and therefore establishing for the first time a rationally comprehensible connexion between the one set and the other. To Saturn, which was cold because of its distance from the sun (whether the Stoics thought it moist or dry we do not know), everything cold on earth was first related and finally subordinated ; and it is clear that this embodying of planetary qualities in a universal framework of natural laws must have brought the basic tenet of astrology, namely, the dependence of all earthly things and events upon the "influence" of the heavenly bodies, considerably nearer to Greek thought. 



Klibansky, R., E. Panofsky & F. Saxl, 1979, Saturn and Melancholy. Nendeln/ Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint.