Under the Black Sun:Reflections from the Idle Place
8H Intro
Today is my birthday, and I’ve just emerged from an 8th House profection year—a year carved by death, renewal, and the shadows they leave behind. In ancient astrology, the 8th House was called the "Idle Place," an evocative term borrowed from Babylonian traditions where the eighth month marked a cessation of work. It’s a house of pause and inertia, where the rhythms of life falter and descend into silence. Yet this stillness is deceptive; below the surface, the 8th House churns with unseen forces. It is a space of reckoning, where debts—both tangible and intangible—rise to the surface and demand attention. It’s where we confront what we’ve inherited: wealth, trauma, stories etched into blood and bone, all waiting to be named and reshaped.
This year tore through me like molten gold, a heat so vivid it burned away every structure I once trusted to hold me upright. Grief didn’t just surround me—it entered me, searing and unrelenting, dissolving the edges of who I thought I was. I became liquid, pooling into the gaps and cracks of where I thought I was heading and the past left behind, my form slipping into those obsidian hollows that can never be filled. Some days, it surged hot and wild, fire racing through my veins, igniting every nerve with a fever I couldn’t quench; other days, it lay heavy, viscous and unyielding, an ink-black weight pressing deep into the contours of my body. I felt myself softening, reshaping, yet not by choice. That force what acts against us, uncontrollable Time and the Spiderwomen’s will, took the knife of grief and carved into me, its incandescent touch both destructive and creative, unraveling the stable seams of who I thought I was, leaving only a raw, trembling dawn in its wake.
The 8th House doesn’t offer relief from these absences—it magnifies them. It doesn’t soothe; it confronts. It asks, over and over: What do we owe to the dead? What do we owe ourselves in the wailing of the wake of loss? This is the paradox of the 8th House: it takes us into stillness only to demand motion, drawing us into its shadows and asking us to see what’s been hidden there. This is not presence as comfort but as weight, matters of matter that demand to be felt, held, and carried.
The 8th House exposed itself as a place of metamorphosis, the liminal space where the imaginal meets the material. I lived in that cave this year, a sunken cave underwater as my home, as someone stitched into its fabric. Grief became more than absence. It was alive, viscous, and insistent. It stretched me in ways I didn’t know I could endure, demanding I dance on harlequin tiptoes, bend backwards to see how full emptiness really is—so full, it overflows.
The 8th House doesn’t provide answers. It offers raw material—grief, silence, and the echoloss of absence, showing us its potential to transmute it into something new. Whether we can endure that process is the question it leaves us with. But in surrendering to the night, we see the stars more clearly. As house of inheritance then, what better place to dig into the tunnels of my body’s secrets, open the lock to the doors kept hidden, to find gold.
It Began
It began as a rupture deep within the framework of my body—an ache at the base of my spine, pressing against my surgery scars, radiating upward in jagged waves. The ache wasn’t just physical. It whispered of things long buried, as if the Old Ones, in their furyroot dreaming, had found the fractures in my foundation and begun pressing outward, unmaking me from the inside. It splintered the structure that once held me steady, those relational ideas that allow us to form a secure sense of identity. Instead, the familiar became foreign. The symphony of silence within me couldn’t possibly provide rest—it reverberated, welldeep and endless, expanding into a vastness I couldn’t at first comprehend.
Countless times throughout the year a choice was offered me; adapt or die. I never like being told what to do, so I chose both. With each loss, I embodied absence, full and heavy with everything that had been taken, with all I could no longer hold. Grief wasn’t just an emotion; it was a presence, sharp as ice and burning fire, threading through me like a needle pulling all my pieces apart. Each moment arrived in fragments, snapshots caught between flickers of light and swallowing shadow, shattering any illusion of wholeness. I had to learn to hold them—to press their jagged edges into my palms, even as they cut me, left me bloody, until they softened. I spent the year learning to weave them into something whole, embracing the time and skill it takes to form them into a shape that would allow me to once again breathe.
Prima Materia
This, I’ve come to understand, has been a process of nigredo. Alchemy teaches that before anything can transform, it must first break apart. Nigredo, the blackening, is not a gentle unraveling—it is the raw, relentless dissolution of what was, leaving fragments and chaos in its wake. Yet even in this chaos lies the possibility of renewal. The alchemists believed that all creation begins with prima materia, the raw, formless essence that holds the potential for everything. The Rosarium Philosophorum, a mid-16th century cornerstone of alchemical thought, speaks of this moment as a collision of opposites, a violent union that births something wholly new. Prima materia is seductive in its paradox, both everything and nothing at once—aching with all that could be but demanding complete disintegration before it can reveal its true nature. To touch it is to caress the self, to surrender to the breaking, the melting, the exquisite ache of becoming One. [1]
Grief tore through me like a storm, stripping away illusions and carving the world into stark contrasts. It’s aliveness surprised me, but as I began to converse with it, honor it as any alive thing, I started to perceive something I could not name—something dense, raw, and infinite. What remained after the tempest was not the grief itself but the formless ground it exposed, the prima materia lying dormant beneath the wreckage. Grief was not the substance but the lens, the force that commanded me to see through darkness, to recognize the chaotic potential beneath what had crumbled—the gift of blind eyes that see. It didn’t ask for my understanding; it demanded my surrender—to witness in awe at its unveiling and trust that something essential was waiting to emerge. It was not destruction for its own sake, but a grace that unmade in order to make anew.
Nigerdo: Living Under the Black Sun
Alchemy begins in darkness. Nigredo, the blackening, is where the black sun rises—a paradoxical light that doesn’t clarify but consumes. Its light doesn’t illuminate so much as reveal, not by making things visible but by burning away what we think we know. Under its shadow, the self unravels, not in a clean and orderly way but chaotically, fraying at the edges until it collapses entirely. The 8th House, astrologically, mirrors this terrain. It’s not just the realm of death but of what the dead leave behind: inheritances, grief, the debris of what was. It is the house where we confront what binds us and what we owe, both to others and to ourselves.
My year traversing the 8th has felt like living under the black sun. Loss didn’t just surround me—it pressed inward, molten and unbearable, burning through any sense of orientation I had to combat the uncomfortability of the body’s movement through Time. The threads of my life unraveled, one by one, until I couldn’t tell where one loss ended and the next began. Friendships dissolved, expectations crumbled, and the bonds I once relied on turned to ash in my hands. Grief suffocated me, like smoke hot and cold at once, stinging and numbing, nettle leaves dancing the most porous sensations across my chest, through down to my fingers and toes. Some days, it was a sharp ache, a thousand pinpricks to the heart. Other days, it lingered at the edge of my mind, an itch that no amount of reasoning or avoidant tendencies might soothe. I spent more days than I can count in mourning, not just for what was lost, but for the version of myself that had believed in permanence, in stability, in a world where things didn’t fall apart so completely.
In her webinar on the Idle Place, astrologer Demetra George describes the 8th House as where we reckon with loss and learn to let go of what binds us. But knowing this intellectually doesn’t really prepare you for how violent that reckoning can be. When confronted with the reality that grief is alive, viscous and insistent, letting go is no longer offered as a choice; it sounds as a demand, one I had to meet over and over again. The 8th House compels us to confront the legacies etched into us—traumas passed through blood and bone, stories that tether us to others and to the land. It forces us to reckon with what we carry, not just as loss, but as an inheritance that shapes and shadows our becoming, demanding both acknowledgment and transformation. The price we pay comes in what we are willing to sacrifice, to the waiting winds, to the low baritone of the wind’s whining moans. I wanted to honor this, so I too became Bean sídhe. I fell apart. I let sound and silence collide in my throat. I felt the suffocating cacophony of all my ghosts pressing down on me, heavy and inescapable. I put my attention towards that witness—gifting grief and myself a two part harmony to sing.
Rosarium Philosophorum
The Rosarium Philosophorum captures this transformative process with striking precision: “Here Sol plainly dies again, and is drowned with the Mercury of the Philosophers.” [2] Sol, the sun, represents clarity, vitality, and the ego—the part of us that clings to stability and control. Its death in the mercurial waters is not a quiet surrender but a violent, sacred undoing. As Adam McLean observes, these waters—depicted in the Mercurial Fountain—“pour forth the threefold soul-substance: the Virgin’s Milk (the feminine receptive lunar forces in the soul), the Spring of Vinegar (the masculine sharp, penetrating solar forces in the soul), and the Aqua Vitae, the water of life (the inner source of soul energies).” [3] Grief, like this alchemical fountain, is a paradoxical flow of opposing forces: tender yet sharp, nourishing yet corrosive. It unravels the ego’s threads, forcing a confrontation with chaos, yet in its violence lies the potential for renewal. The dissolution it imposes is not just an ending but the unsettling groundwork for a reconstitution of the self—raw, changed, and reoriented toward a more fluid connection to life.
This past year, my body held grief like a winter coat—heavy, damp, and inescapably necessary, suffused with all that white snow that could no longer be contained by the cloud’s crying eyes. At times, I felt submerged, drowned in those mercurial waters. They filled my lungs with the breath of pneuma, asking me to find within this blackness a light. The spirits who surrounded me urged surrender, their voices rising like a haunting wind: “You must learn to fly,” they whispered. “Let the uncomfortability in your body gift you the clarity to see what has always been there—wings, open and waiting, ready to carry you with the currents of air, fire, water, settling you back among the Earth.” To claim the bird-fetch of my witchbody, however, first required a process of unmaking—not as bloodied severing of spirit from body, but as a deep recalibration of both the material and immaterial forms. The clarifying gift of seeing that they have always been a part of the same, new wine and new skin.
In fact, the Rosarium explains this process as a mutual reformation of body and spirit. “Solution and coagulation of the body are two things but they have one operation, because the spirit is not coagulated, but with the solution of the body; neither is the body dissolved, but with the coagulation of the spirit.” [4] This principle teaches that body and soul are not separate entities but two aspects of the same being, bound together in cathartic symbiosis. Like water softening earth and earth thickening water, the material and immaterial shape and are shaped by each other, creating something new in their union. My spirits once told me, “Tears water the garden; with their nourishing waters, trees that provide a legacy of shade and nourishment for all who sit under their leaves may grow in time.” In their wisdom, I found the truth of grief—not as destruction, but as the tender art of cultivation. The ache in the chest, the weight behind the eyes, the restless pull of memory—all soften what was once hardened, saturating the soil of the self. In time, this breaking and soaking give way to new roots that take hold. And from these roots, trees of transmutation rise, offering shade, shelter, and sustenance not only to the self but to all who seek refuge beneath their branches.
As the Rosarium reminds us: “The philosophical putrefaction is nothing else but a corruption and destruction of bodies. For one form being destroyed, nature presently brings into it another form, more better and subtle.” [5] In this alchemical process, corruption is not an act of contortion but one of nature’s deepest harmonies—a transformation hidden within decay. Putrefaction unfolds not as violent destruction but as a deliberate, tender decomposition, where the body’s rigidity softens and its inner substances mingle, dissolve, and reconfigure. In this slow unraveling, the material body and the imaginal body begin to merge, forming something more fluid and expansive.
This union creates a body capable of holding contradiction—a body that can run and return between grief and pleasure, absence and presence. No longer fixed in its forms, the body becomes a site of generative possibility, a vessel that metabolizes both the sharp ache of loss and pain alongside the intoxicating pulse of pleasure and joy. The Rosarium teaches us that “without corruption, there can be no generation,” [6] reminding us that this process of dissolution is not an ending but a gateway. Through the putrefaction of form, the body is reshaped into something supple and alive, a sacred container for transformation. It is in this fertile breakdown that the body learns to move with the rhythms of life, oscillating between shadow and light, sorrow and ecstasy, with an aliveness that bridges the seen and unseen.
The Carving Alchemy of Grief
In my own experience, the grief I was gifted with during my 8H year mirrored this alchemical rhythm. It eroded the structures I had clung to, not in a sudden destruction but in a slow, relentless undoing. My becoming of a Black Sun revealed the dissolution already underway, yet within this darkness lay the latent seeds of all my dreams. The Black Sun, as I understand it, is not bound to nigredo alone but occupies the transitional phase between black and red, dissolution and coagulation. It is both the void and the light hidden within.
Anne Carson evokes this imagery in her reflections on poetic processes, where dissolution unveils latent possibilities and absence becomes generative through the interplay of speech and silence, the visual and invisible. In Economy of the Unlost, Carson describes etching as an art of deliberate subtraction: “An etching begins with a drawing on a zinc or copper plate. The drawing is done with a needle or fine-pointed instrument. In order for the lines of the needle to be visible on the plate, whose surface is highly transparent, the ground of the plate is blackened. The etcher therefore makes a drawing of white lines on a black surface—it is an inside-out drawing, a negative design.” [7] This act of “negative designing” reverses conventional notions of creation. Instead of adding to the surface, the etcher removes—carving, scraping, and biting away—to allow the image to emerge. Presence, in this process, is defined by absence, and what is stripped away becomes the naked space where intimacy is born.
This inversion mirrors the alchemical stage of nigredo, described by Carson as “an initial separation of the elements of the prima materia” where “the elements turn black and undergo a ‘death.’” [8] Nigredo is the sacred obliteration that dissolves what is rigid and fixed, breaking apart forms to uncover their essential components. The blackened ground of the etching plate becomes a potent symbol for this process—a space where darkness holds the potential for light, and negation creates the conditions for renewal. Like the etcher’s needle cutting through blackness to reveal white lines, nigredo forces us to confront the chaos within ourselves, uncovering the hidden contours of being that only dissolution can reveal.
Yet alchemy does not linger in darkness. Its formula predicates pressing forward, seductive in its promise, moving beyond dissolution into an ecstatic metamorphosis. It culminates in rubedo—that reddening Coagula that Carson describes as “the final stage of solidification and the goal of the process.” [9] In rubedo, what was shattered in nigredo is not simply repaired but tempered and fused, merging opposites into a chimera—a body both strange and irresistible, tongue dipped back into jaw, steaming with the heat of union, wholly wet and wholly new.
Carson frames this phase as one of resurrection, where the scattered fragments of the self are drawn together with a fiery intimacy, reinvigorated, and imbued with a sensual vitality. The color red pulses here as a symbol of life renewed, a flush of heat and rejuvenation signaling that the raw edges of darkness and light have not only met but entwined, yielding to one another in a union that is both stimulatingly electric and frighteningly engulfing .
The red of rubedo is more than a hue; it represents a self reimagined, transformed by its descent into dissolution. Much like an etched plate emerging from an acid bath, bearing an image defined by the spaces where material was removed, the self in rubedo carries the marks of grief and negation—but these marks are no longer scars of destruction. Instead, they are the feral imprints of renewal and growth, a testament to the alchemical power of attention and transformation. Rubedo does not restore what was lost; it creates something entirely new, a self tempered by fire and refined through shadow, shaped by the ache of negation and the tender care of reintegration.
Poetic Witnessing and the Alchemy of Attention
The journey from dissolution to transformation, from nigredo to rubedo, hinges on attention—not a casual gaze, but the deliberate and piercing act of witnessing, whether this witness is of self or other. Carson calls this the labor of the poet: “The poet does not just use memory, he embodies it… His alienation flows open as experience and paradigm.” [10] To embody memory is to let it carve into the flesh of your being, shaping thought and language as it moves. The poet becomes a wound and a mirror, both fractured and whole, a site where the absence of what was begins to pulse with life again. Alienation, Carson shows us, is not a void but a vital force, a crack where the self spills out and becomes porous, where the ache of estrangement is transformed into something vast and uncontainable—a paradigm, a rhythm, a new language.
For me, this attention takes shape in my artistic practices. In this case, my writing—my thesis, this essay, and all further posts on this blog. Each act of expression performs a dual role: it bears witness to my emotional body while simultaneously reshaping it with the sword of language, how I choose to play with the silent and spoken word. In Economy of the Unlost, Carson reflects on how poets "save and are saved by the dead." [11] This dynamic mirrors my own experience of poetic expression, where grief becomes both the bones I carry and the bridge that allows me to move forward. By naming what haunts me, I elongate the echo of its soft and silken voice, allowing it to resonate and transform into a gift I can share.
Self-witnessing is not merely an act of introspection; it is an ethical engagement, a reciprocal act that Carson describes as the foundation of the "gift economy." This economy is sustained by charis—a Greek term encompassing grace, favor, goodwill, and gratitude, forming the texture of exchanges between giver and receiver. “Grace is the strange and impetuous currency,” Carson writes, “an interchange of life and death embedded in the poet’s function.” [12] In this framework, acts of attention and expression are not solitary or static but deeply relational, extending beyond the self to touch and engage others through the inspiring grace of showcasing the potential to care, to hold, to perform witness.
Writing, or any of my artistic expressions then, are not merely catharsis but ritual acts of care—a deliberate offering of myself through performance and language. Like the alchemist dissolving and reconstituting matter, I have committed myself to a process of breaking apart and refining experience, shaping memory into something tangible and shareable. Carson frames this labor as an interchange of being, where “the poet embodies memory,” holding both its loss and its renewal in tension. This act, she suggests, moves beyond personal alienation to become “experience and paradigm,” a shared pathway through which others might recognize their own estrangement and transformation. [13]
Through this lens, self-witnessing becomes an act of radical generosity, where the artist transforms the raw material of their own dissolution into a gift. It is a way of holding the fragments of one’s being up to the light, inviting others to witness not just what is broken but the potential for fractalization, color blending, hope held in a rainbow. Artistic entanglement becomes a form of grace—an act of giving that both restores and sustains, offering the possibility of connection in the wake of fracture. This reciprocity, as Carson reminds us, is what allows memory to take root in time, ensuring that the self's transformations are not merely endured but witnessed, honored, and shared.
This is why I’ve chosen to write autoethnographically, to carve out space where my oscillations between memory, presence, and dreamtime can be witnessed and poetically expressed. In doing so, I hope to expand my capacity for movement within the silent spaces of grief and creation, allowing myself to be more malleable, more alive, and more attuned to the rhythms of loss and renewal. Poetic witnessing, as Carson shows us, is not about finding closure but about elongating presence, holding grief and grace in tandem, and allowing something wholly new to emerge from the fracture.
This is the alchemy of attention: a sacred, unending dance between dissolution and creation, absence and presence, black and red. It is a practice of living in the gap, of seeing through the black sun’s shadow to the red dawn it conceals, and of trusting that every word, every witness, is a thread in the loom of transformation.
Welcome—to Autobiography of a Halfling.
Footnotes:
[1] Sociedad Química de México, Rosarium Philosophorum: A Rosary of the Philosophers, 52-53
[2] Sociedad Química de México, Rosarium Philosophorum: A Rosary of the Philosophers, 55
[3] https://www.alchemywebsite.com/roscom.html
[4] Sociedad Química de México, Rosarium Philosophorum: A Rosary of the Philosophers, 15
[5] Sociedad Química de México, Rosarium Philosophorum: A Rosary of the Philosophers, 16
[6] Sociedad Química de México, Rosarium Philosophorum: A Rosary of the Philosophers, 15
[7] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 113
[8] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 97
[9] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 98
[10] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 43
[11] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 74
[12] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 27
[13] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 43
