From the Grain in the Earth: The Three of Swords, The Five of Cups, Death and the Eight of Cups

“No new life can arise, say the alchemists, without the death of the old. They liken the art to the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to waken to new life.” — C.G. Jung, Collected Works 16, ¶467.

Bored and eating breakfast on a Sunday, I watched Netflix’s Fantastic Fungi — a compelling documentary about mushrooms. Too often their psychedelic properties are spotlighted at the expense of the incredible ecological function they perform. Time-lapse footage of mushrooms breaking down organic matter, while oddly satisfying to watch, was also strangely illuminating. As I observed the decomposition of plant matter on screen, it suddenly became clear why Nicholas Culpeper attributed mushrooms to Saturn’s dominion: they digest and recycle dead matter, turning it into nature’s prima materia so that the cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth can begin anew.

In alchemy, putrefactio and mortificatio mean very much what you think they do: they are two sides of nigredo, a process which, incorporated into the canon of archetypal psychology, points to a dark time when the “matter” of our lives is rotting and dying away. Jung, basing it on the melancholy described by the alchemists, called it a “black blacker than black.” We may know it better by other terms, like the “dark night of the soul,” and some of us may have even experienced it first-hand.