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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, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
The Joseph Campbell Foundation is publishing this MythBlast the day after the winter solstice of 2024 (for Northern Hemisphere residents). When it happens, no matter one’s hemisphere, this monumental event in the sky manifests as the sun appears to stop its retreat down the dawn and dusk horizons—the term solstice coming from sol, sun, and sistere, to stop. It also marks the longest night of the year, and although the winter has officially only begun and more cold times lie ahead, the turning of the sun to higher angles signals that days will soon increase in length, darkness will retreat, and warmth will return. While those in equatorial regions miss this aspect of the changing length of days and temperatures, most of us have the yearly, lived experience of sunlight lessening, weather cooling, and vegetation withering and dying before the opposite occurs.
This sky event and longest night have always reminded me (in the as-above-so-below way) of a phenomenon termed “the dark night of the soul.” This phrase, coined by the Spanish poet and mystic St. John of the Cross, has come to equally signify a distressing, troublesome life season and a subsequently transformative spiritual episode. In view of the MythBlast themes this month, a dark night can be a death of sorts, especially since loss and endings of all kinds quite often accompany it. The renewal theme is not guaranteed, however, as simple recovery from this period might not evoke any newness, only grief and despair (all of these themes have been skillfully addressed by my fellow MythBlast writers this month). The transformative quality of the soul’s dark night must be evoked through intentional contemplation and meaning making.
Viral impairment: mono(litihic) weakness
Of the times in my life that I can unequivocally label as a dark night of the soul, one was my experience of mononucleosis. While the onset of my infection with the Epstein-Barr virus felt like other viral illnesses (producing fever, body aches, fatigue), as time progressed the weakening of my muscles overtook all other symptoms. I gradually found walking short distances tiring, and soon even the standing rest that I was forced to take more frequently didn’t renew my energy. When speaking, I started randomly failing to produce sound—I would simply go silent mid-sentence. Prying open sealed jars or bags, never before a problem, became difficult and then impossible. I needed to remain in bed almost for the duration of my waking hours, with only trips to the bathroom and kitchen possible. At my lowest point, I actually would roll off my bed as I could only to crawl to my destination; walking had become that difficult.
I hadn’t realized how much my life and ideology leading up to this point had been founded on the assumption of bodily autonomy, physical power, and (directly influenced by Emerson’s essay as a teen) self-reliance. No prior illness or injury had placed me for so long into the category of disabled. I could not have even imagined myself in such a category. Yet there I was, with no say in the matter and no path out of it. In Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals, Thomas Moore conveys this feeling of helplessness and the encounter with something so beyond one’s normal way of facing the world.
During the dark night there is no choice but to surrender control, give in to unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It’s a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal … a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares you for.
Many of Moore’s words echo the events of the fall-into-winter progress of the sun and seasons: “surrender,” “stop” (as in sun-stop/solstice), “enforced retreat,” “a profound initiation.” And in my case, the physical component reflected a sort of autumn and then winter of my body, which evoked the darkness within my soul. This was a soulstice—an enforced standing still of my physical and spiritual aspects.
This was a soulstice—an enforced standing still of my physical and spiritual aspects.
Gifts of the night: making meaning in the dark
Campbell regularly addressed the need for darkness as a precedent to light/enlightenment. Aside from the epigraph of this essay, one of his most-quoted affirmations concerning this concept is: “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life … The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you were looking for” (Reflections on the Art of Living, pg. 24). Somehow, these night-evoking places—the abyss, the cave—are both tomb and womb, both a death and a renewal, as is the renowned Belly of the Whale in the hero’s journey.
In the case of my bout of mononucleosis, what treasures of life were there in it for me? What was I looking for, even if unconsciously? Cliché though it may be, we only get to know the full experience of life through contrasts, and my foray into the abyss of disability galvanized my appreciation for all the abilities I’d enjoyed and taken for granted all my life. To move, to walk without tiring—these were not givens, they were gifts.
Even more deeply, I found myself, as I began to recover some strength, at the grocery store for the first time in a long while and moving quite slowly. Suddenly, I noticed the others there who were moving slowly, people who before I might have simply blown past or even gotten annoyed at for their sluggishness. I unexpectedly realized that I had been “erasing” or, worse, disparaging fellow humans who were outside of my energy/strength paradigm. The treasure of life I had found was the feeling of connection with and compassion for more people because my experience had allowed me to live in their world.
So as to approach the dark nights of the outer or inner world more mindfully, we can ask ourselves: what aspects of life-as-it-is has this loss or deprivation made me appreciate more? What new segment of humanity is now my “tribe” because of it? What qualities has this “initiation,” as Moore calls it, evoked in me, unbidden though the experience was? Only through careful contemplation can any experience of the dark acquire the power of the death and renewal that Campbell envisions.
MythBlast authored by:
Scott Neumeister is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey
Latest Podcast
This bonus episode, titled The Birth of the Savior, was recorded in 1962 at WNET, a PBS member station in Newark, New Jersey, serving the New York City area. In this lecture, Joseph Campbell examines the mythology of the "savior" across cultures, with a particular focus on the image of the Christ child.
This Week's Highlights
"Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous 'recurrence of birth' ('palingenesia') to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death."
-- Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 11 - 12