The Dark Night of the Soul

“The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

When everything is lost, and all seems darkness,

then comes the new life and all that is needed.”

~ Joseph Campbell

Psychological Truth of the Dark Night

Have you ever had a dream where you were travelling at night?  Or were lost in a cave?  Travelling through a tunnel towards an unknown destination?  

Or life hit you with an event so big that it knocked you off your center?  Loss of marriage?  Loss of job? Or another outer event so monumental or traumatic that it defies explanation or logic?   A trauma that calls into question everything that you thought was true? 

These experiences can be destabilizing.  We easily lose meaning. We have the experience of floating through life without direction and without connection and purpose. Many, in the throes of the dark night, experience depression.  

The Universality of the Psycho-Spiritual Human Journey 

Mythology, spiritual stories and great literature are full of similar journeys.  Universally,  heroes and heroines have found themselves in strange circumstances and must journey through a dark night, a trial of some sort, to emerge with a new awareness of all that we are unconscious of.  Great myths and fairy tales provide guidance in terms of how to approach these difficult journeys.  They are needed when a change is required, when we must confront our unconscious behaviour, change our script, or create something new. 

Egyptian mythology captures the journey to the underworld in Ra, the Sun God.  Every night Ra descends into the underworld and must battle a malevolent force – APEP – a spirit of evil, darkness and destruction.    

In the literature, APEP was born out of chaos and uncertainty. In one myth, he hypnotizes the sun god – an image of our ego going asleep or acting on automatic pilot.  

Psychologically,  the energy of darkness and chaos from events that we experience as storms or earthquakes,  symbolically plunges awareness and consciousness – that is the Sun God into a battle for rebirth.   This is not just stuff of myth but a lived experience today,  universal images that were echoed in the alchemical texts’ centuries later. 

In the old testament, Jonah is called to live a path of a prophet which he refuses.  He runs away. God upset with him causes a storm. Jonah finds himself in the ocean and is swallowed by a great fish. Jonah lives inside the fish for  three days then the whale throws him up on dry land.  

Symbolically, this myth echoes many other stories where we avoid what we are called to do i.e. our truth or experience.   The psyche is self-correcting and when we deny or avoid, there is an internal reaction.  If we avoid the psychological work long enough, then we can descend into a depression, like being swallowed by a whale.   We experience it as entering a dark and chaotic unconscious inner world. 

What makes the dark night so difficult is that it comes from the collapse of what you have known in your life.   The ego experiences being torn from the familiar, from the known, and from the things that have given life meaning.  The ego experiences it as a death, and an absence.   

The dark night is an ego death – a loss of a certain subjective self-identity which has likely outlived its usefulness. 

St. John of the Cross and the Dark Night 

The term “dark night of the soul” was coined by St. John of the Cross – a Spanish mystic and monk. In the 16th century, St. John and St. Teresa of Avila were part of a movement that tried to reform their religious order.   As a result of his efforts, he was imprisoned for months during which he wrote about this experience.  One poem was titled, “ Dark Night of the Soul”.   St. John of the Cross has referred to this as the first of two dark nights, the other is the dark night of the mind, which is an encounter with the darker aspects of our self (that which Jung called “the shadow”). 

Eventual Rebirth

The road in a dark night of the soul can be long and arduous.  People can experience it as never-ending.  It is difficult to distinguish the dark night from a depression.  Yet, a dark night calls for a spiritual transformation.  It may call for the deepest levels of faith, that in the darkness, there is purpose from the soul’s perspective.  Many people are led into existential reflections like, why am I here? And, what is my purpose? 

In mystical traditions, the final stage is described as illumination, which comes with transformation such as an insight that changes everything. The mystical texts subset that things appear to be new. In psychological terms, we recognize that the way we lived before is no longer sustainable and we need to find a new north star. 

If all goes well,  rebirth comes with a transformation of the ego – a new perspective, finding meaning in new activities, a new love,  or even a new vision for your life. People experience meaning again but in ways that they didn’t expect, for all that did not serve in the previous incarnation is no longer relevant.    

Question for reflection

Do you remember a dark night of the soul in your life? 

When was the last time you experienced a dark night of the soul? What changed for you?

Copyright Christina Becker
June 2020

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