Abandoning Hope in the Nigredo: The Paradoxical Necessity of Surrender for Soul’s Illumination

Revisiting the Blackening and the Role of Hope

In my previous exploration of the Nigredo (The Nigredo (Carl Jung): Awakening Is Not What You Think It Is) I examined its psychological and spiritual dimensions as a profound process of dissolution, where the ego’s structures crumble to make way for the soul’s rebirth.Drawing from James Hillman, Stanton Marlan, and Marie-Louise von Franz, I described the Nigredo as an inevitable descent into despair, a “getting lost” that, paradoxically, initiates the work of the soul.

Yet, a central thread in that discussion: the abandonment of hope, demands further philosophical scrutiny. Hope, that most cherished human faculty, is not merely diminished in the Nigredo; it is actively dissolved, as Hillman notes, along with “meaning and the hope for meaning.” This dissolution is not a tragedy but a philosophical imperative, a radical surrender that allows the unconscious to perform its transformative alchemy.

Today, I return to this terrain with a more focused lens:

• What do the alchemical texts and their psychological interpreters truly say about hope in the Nigredo?
• Why must we abandon it, and what liberation arises from this act?

This inquiry is not abstract; it is born from the synchronistic events that accompanied my initial writing, as well as the countless client sessions where hope has been both anchor and obstacle. Philosophically, the Nigredo challenges our Enlightenment-derived optimism, echoing Dante’s admonition:

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

But in alchemy, this abandonment is not despair’s victory; it is the gateway to a deeper, non-solar light, a lumen naturae born from darkness itself (light of nature,” refers to the hidden, intrinsic light or spark discovered within the darkness of matter and the unconscious in alchemical tradition).

The Philosophical Essence of Nigredo: Dissolution as Deconstruction

To understand hope’s role, we must first recapitulate the Nigredo’s operations. As Hillman elucidates in Alchemical Psychology, the processes of mortificatio (mortification), putrefactio (putrefaction), calcinatio (calcination), and iteratio (repetition) are “slow, repetitive, difficult,” inducing a psychic state of depression, confusion, and anguish.

Black, as a “non-color,” extinguishes the “perceptual colored world,” dissolving not only positivity but the very hope for meaning. This deconstruction is necessary for any “paradigm shift,” Hillman argues, because it prevents phenomena from “presenting their virtues” under old lenses.

Philosophically, this aligns with a Heideggerian notion of Gelassenheit (releasement) or a Nietzschean affirmation of Amor Fati, accepting the eternal recurrence without the crutch of teleological hope. In the Nigredo, hope is the ego’s teleology: a projection of future salvation that resists the present’s chaos. The texts reveal that clinging to hope stiffens consciousness, as von Franz warns: “If consciousness works according to nature, the blackness is not so black or so destructive, but if the sun stands still, it is stiffened, and burns life to death.” Hope “stills the sun,” freezing the alchemical flow and prolonging suffering. It is the ego’s refusal to die, mistaking control for vitality.

Hope as Obstacle: Myths and the Imperative of Abandonment

The alchemical tradition, interpreted through depth psychology, debunks several myths about suffering that center on hope.

• First, the Nigredo is not punitive, a reward for “bad” behavior or karma’s retribution. It is structural, a losing of control but not of the soul.
• Second, darkness is not an evil force intent on destruction, though it may manifest as illness, loss, or crisis.
• Third, and most crucially for this discussion, the Nigredo demands the abandonment of hope “precisely because our old programming doesn’t know what to appropriately hope for.” Hope, rooted in egoic understanding, keeps us from the experience itself.

We have to accept that what we are going through is beyond our understanding otherwise we would not be able to go through changes.
If we had it figured out we would control it and not the other way around.

Philosophically, this echoes Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” or the apophatic tradition in mysticism (e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius or Meister Eckhart), where God is known through unknowing, negating affirmations to approach the divine.

Hope affirms a known future; abandonment negates it, opening to the unknown. Marlan, in The Black Sun, describes the peril of attachment:

“Those who cannot let go and who deny the loss create a situation of impossible mourning.”

attaching to a “fundamental sadness” as their “Sol object.” Hope, similarly, becomes a false Sol, a stiffened sun, that dams the psychic flow.

To attach to hope is to prolong the Nigredo; to abandon it is to allow putrefaction’s fertility.

The Paradoxical Light: Surrender and the Emergence of Soul

What, then, arises from this abandonment? The texts speak of a “mysterious light” that is “itself the darkness”, not a triumphant solar illumination banishing shadow, but a lunar, intrinsic glow from the blackened materia. In alchemical terms, this is the spark of the scintilla, the seed of gold hidden in lead. Psychologically, it is the unconscious pouring in “new and vital forces,” as the ego crashes and room is made for soul-work. The false self, those “weighted lead of old thinking,” the “heavy king’s crown”, cooks away, unveiling the “true and liberating love of the universe.”

Philosophically, this paradox resolves in a unio oppositorum: Darkness and light coincide, as in the Taoist yin-yang or Heraclitus’s “hidden harmony.”

“Abandoning hope is not nihilism but profound trust, a surrender to what we “cannot know,” which “will always feel like death in some respect.”

Yet, in that death, resurrection: The soul, trapped behind false identities, is liberated. Von Franz’s warning underscores the natural flow: Align with nature’s blackness, and it nourishes; resist with hope’s stiffness, and it actually destroys.

Vested Interest in the Abyss – A Philosophical Invitation

In this deeper look, the texts reveal hope not as ally but as subtle adversary in the Nigredo, a projection that damns and prolongs the psyche by denying the unknown’s gift. Do we attach to hope, inviting endless stagnation? Or identify with suffering as eternal? Neither serves the soul. Instead, cultivate a “vested interest” in the experience:

Observe without control, surrender without despair.

In alchemy as in philosophy, the Nigredo is accomplishment: The beginning of true illumination through radical unknowing. May we abandon hope not in defeat, but in faith, for in that void, the soul awakens. What attachments to hope linger in your own darkness?