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“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
— Isiah 5:20, New International Version
“Western racial discourse provides the means by which black becomes a sign of the quintessence of all human depravity, of all that is evil, vile, sinister, grisly, immoral, hidden, the betwixt and between, the occult, the forces of darkness, the macabre and malevolent….In this context, black is juxtaposed against the apparent bright a shining wholesomeness, decency, and wide-eyed innocence of white”
— Theresa H. Pfeifer, “Deconstructing Cartesian Dualisms of Western Racialized Systems: A Study in the Colors Black and White” (2009: 534)
Roughly 11% of the American population is afraid of the dark. Psychologist speculate on the reasons for this. Some believe the fear is developed from adverse life events. However, some call it a ‘prepared’ fear, in that there may be an evolutionary reason for this, in that darkness during the early history of humanity posed a threat to us.
Many people, then, accept as common sense that the dark is a fearful thing. In an ocularcentric culture, we prioritise the sense of sight when apprehending our surroundings. Naturally, things are different for blind or visually impaired people, but the treatment of them in society also shows how we normalise sight as the way to experience the world. When things are dark, our vision is occluded, and because we are so reliant on it, we feel disoriented and, quite often, at least a little bit scared.
Darkness has come to mean things in culture, often through metaphor, just as light has. But has the association between darkness and light as a binary opposition which then maps onto such concepts as fearful/awesome, evil/good, death/life, rebellion/order, primal/spiritual and others always been so? Well, in short, no it hasn’t. And is it a quite innocent practice to create these socially constructed oppositions? Again, no. As Elizabeth Grosz says in her 1994 (p. 3) book Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism:
Dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other [is its] suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart.
So, this history and application of the binary (or polarity) of light and dark—which is seeing a resurgence at the moment with talk of the “dark feminine” and “dark goddesses” [1] both inside and outside witchcraft and pagan circles, as well as the now very common “love and light” new age spirituality—is a rather complicated one. To understand this more, let’s look at the meaning of darkness throughout history, starting with our Neolithic ancestors.
Darkness and Rites of Passage in the Neolithic Era
Darkness for our Neolithic ancestors played a key role in their spirituality. Many of their rites of passage took place within caves, naturally darkened places that needed to be navigated with senses other than sight. This was the case in places such as Italy, as Ruth Whitehouse (2016) writes in her chapter in The Archaeology of Darkness. During the fifth to sixth millennia BCE, caves that were otherwise unfit for human habitation became important places for rituals such as these. In this, darkness came to signify something holy: the exchange of secrets, the passing through different phases of life—in short, liminality.
Liminality is a word used very frequently in magical communities but not often in the correct context if we look at the term anthropologically. It refers, in these contexts, to the middle of a three-part transformation from one state to another, such as becoming initiated as a magical practitioner. In the first stage, one is still not the thing you are going to become. In the last stage, the transformation is complete: you are now a magical practitioner, or whatever your culture calls that. It is in the middle stage—where you are neither here nor there—that is liminal.
For the Neolithic peoples, the cave was the environment in which this liminal state took place. As Ruth Whitehouse (2016: 35) words it:
in this context, darkness — standing for invisibility, death and rebirth and experienced as disorienting, confusing and frightening — would have contributed to this feeling of transformation.
Darkness in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia (‘the Near East’)
It is within the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia (what is often called in the West either the ‘Near-’ or ‘Middle East’) that we first begin to see darkness being associated with fearful things in opposition to light being associated with goodness.
As P. Kyle McCarter Jr. (2011: 19) writes in his article ‘Dualism in Antiquity’:
These eschatological dualisms, as they are sometimes called, seem to have begun to assert themselves among the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia in the second half of the first millennium B.C.E.
By ‘eschatological’ dualism, he means here religious dualism in which the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, typically mapped on to ‘light’ and ‘dark’ respectively, fight against one another, with it being fated in some way that the forces of good will eventually prevail. We see this in Zoroastrianism, which was found around 600 BCE. We also see it in Manichaeism, which came later during the third century CE, but this religion called its prophet Mani the ‘Apostle of Light’ or the ‘Illuminator’. In apocalyptic Judaism, as McCarter Jr. (2013) goes on to write, the world was divided during this battle into the ‘Children of Light’ and the ‘Children of Darkness’.
As for the Eastern Mediterranean, in Ancient Greece, darkness and light had many connotations, playing different roles in mythology and cult. Often darkness was still used as a marker of liminality, with devotees finishing their rite of passage at sunrise and coming into the light of enlightenment, as Efrosyni Boutsikas (2017) writes in her book chapter The Role of Darkness in Ancient Greek Religion and Religious Practice. It was also still associated with secrecy, meaning it lent itself to be the time of magical practice. Because the Underworld was thought of as impenetrably dark, it gathered connotations of death too. As Boutsikas (2017) goes on to write:
In many examples from ancient literature, darkness, apart from being associated with death, is also synonymous with evil and trickery… and with strong negative emotions such as fear, grief, and despair… Most commonly, darkness is used as a metaphor for ignorance, in contrast to light, which always stands for knowledge.
As we can see, then, darkness had many connotations in these places during Ancient times, but the associations with death, evil, and negativity began to form during this time, as did its polarity with light.
The Importance of Darkness in East Asia: Silent Retreats and Yinyang
Many are familiar with the concept of yinyang which comes from East Asia. According to McCarter Jr. (2011: 20), the concept emerged in the third quarter of the first millennium BCE. As he writes, “It was at this time that yin and yang came to be thought of as primal cosmic forces, the former negative, weak, and passive, and the latter positive, strong, and active”.
Yin and yang, as we can see, were seen as complementary parts of the universe. At this point, it was not mapped onto the gender binary. However, with the influence of Taoism and Confucianism, yin and yang developed other connotations. McCarter Jr. (2011: 20) continues:
The essentially passive yin was associated with Earth and the moon, and with water, coldness, darkness, and femininity. The active yang was linked with Heaven and the sun, and with fire, heat, brightness, and masculinity.
We can see how this may be problematic. To associate femininity with the material plane, as opposed to the exalted heavens, and to call it naturally weak, passive, and negative, shows a whole host of prejudices against femininity, as these are traits thought to be cosmically inherent within it (we see similar things happening in the West at a later point, so don’t think we get off scot-free!).
It also shows how, even outside of the areas that have been called in the present the West and Near East, ideas around darkness’ negativity (in contrast to a positive light) were being formed at around the same time in places much farther away.
Darkness and Light in Christianity
It is within Christianity that we begin to see the associations of darkness with evil and light with benevolence cement itself, as we see in the opening quote that urges believers to reject darkness. Indeed, so crucial is the concept of light within Christianity that we see it as one of God’s first creations in Genesis 1:1–1:4:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
As we see here, God specifically dubs light ‘good’. The Bible therefore starts with this presupposition. We also see how light becomes associated with God, Jesus, and holiness in John 8:12:
Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life”.
Furthermore, 1 John 1:5 states:
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.
There are plenty more verses that could be quoted to illustrate this point more, but this should suffice to show how a binary opposition between light and darkness has been firmly created and mapped on to binaries such as sacred/profane, good/evil, and holy/unholy. Indeed, darkness becomes specifically tied to the Christian conception of the Devil/Satan and other angels who rebelled in 2 Peter 2:4:
For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment.
As such, light has played a huge part in Christian religiosity, and features heavily within its theology. St Augustine writes about light being tied to cognition, and calls God “that superior light by which the human mind is illuminated”. It is through light that we know the world and become illuminated in our relationship to scripture and religious practice, if we are Christian. Combine this with the role of darkness and light as a binary opposition within the Bible, as we can see how the battle between these concepts becomes a war between good and evil, in which believers consider themselves to be on the side of light, fighting against those shrouded in darkness for not accepting what they consider to be the Word of God.
The Enlightenment and Symbolism: A Quick Note
The Enlightenment is a period of philosophical, scientific, and political change that occurred during 18th century but has its roots in the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. I have written about this period before, in that it is where we see the birth, or cementation, of certain binary oppositions. However, what I want to say here briefly is that the name chosen for this period hearkens back to the Christian conceptions of light as illumination of the mind. It implies that we have moved on from the so-called Dark Ages of Europe into a period of greater awareness. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tell us:
Expressing convictions shared among Enlightenment thinkers of widely divergent doctrines, Kant identifies enlightenment with the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act.
As we can see, then, the usage of the term Enlightenment is not an accident: it refers, instead, to a now well-established binary between light and darkness that maps onto illumination and ignorance. While Enlightenment thinkers may have begun to separate philosophy from religion, adopting instead a secular approach, the name of this revolution still clings to religious conceptions of light as a positive force.
The Shadow in Carl Gustav Jung’s Work
Shadow work is a big topic in spaces for witches and/or pagans. Many profess the need for all witches to do shadow work, with little care for how this can actually be a dangerous practice to undertake on your own if you struggle with mental illness or trauma. That, however, is another post entirely—one I’ll likely write soon.
What is of concern here is the use of the term “shadow”. As The Society for Analytical Psychology tells us, the shadow is a key part of our identity. However, as a shadow, it is one that we refuse to perceive. It is where all of our repressed characteristics reside, and it typically comes out when we regard and project onto others. Quoting Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst responsible for the term, they share the following description:
the shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors… If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that his shadow does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses
While Jung is clear that the shadow can contain positive traits—such as creativity, if the individual has been taught to repress this part of themselves in favour of another (particularly one that is considered more productive for capitalism)—he also claims that it is inferior, animalistic, and a source of evil. This is a direct interplay between archetypes and the light/dark binary. Jung falls into the same trap as others when he perceives the shadow in this way.
Black Critiques of the Binary
I also opened here with a quote from Theresa Pfeifer, from her essay Deconstructing Cartesian Dualisms of Western Racialized Systems: A Study in the Colors Black and White. In this essay, Pfeifer gives a Black studies critique of the binary between black and white, which maps directly onto the light/dark binary discussed here. In this essay, she notes that the conception of black (and therefore darkness) being associated with evil and death is a Western construct. In China, for instance, it is now white that is associated with passing.
However, despite the fact that the colour black being perceived in this way is a Western social construct—therefore meaning it is not based in some natural or biological process—it continues to have real life ramifications on people of colour and, in particular, Black people. As our opening quote shows, Blackness could be considered the place where we foist our collective shadow, associating it with all kinds of negative things. As Pfeifer continues (2009: 534), “In this context, black is juxtaposed against the apparent bright and shining wholesomeness, decency, and wide-eyed innocence of white”. Blackness and whiteness can only be conceived when the other exists. They are co-created as a binary opposition—or a polarity if you wish—in which they reinforce each other.
In modern witchcraft, we often consider darkness and approaching it, working with it, and worshipping it in the form of dark goddesses (covered in the footnote below), as a rebellious act of embracing all that is considered to be negative in society. It is done in a positive way of reclamation. This is all well and good, for we need a balance between both light and darkness within our practices. However, as Pfeifer goes on to note, (2009: 534), “In a sense, there is no blackness as a sign of rebellious disorder without whiteness as a sign of order”. This maps on to racial distinctions too, so we must be careful when talking about the rebellious nature of those embracing their inner darkness. All we have to think about is the disproportionate force of a militarised police state coming down on Black Lives Matter protests to see how “black = rebellion” and “white = order” plays out in our society.
Embracing Darkness in Balance With Light
I am not telling people to outright reject this binary. There are certainly qualities in the dark/light binary that fit very well with our witchcraft practices. As someone who has worked with both of these cosmic forces, I know that there are parts that are true. However, it seems many people at the moment are favouring one over the other, with darkness being very popular at the moment because of the current political turmoil in the US and, indeed, across the world.
The ways in which this is happening tends to eschew the need for balance. It tends to not take a critical lens to how the light/dark binary is mapped on to people with very material ramifications for them. It tends to talk about embracing darkness as empowering, while ignoring how being tied to darkness because of the colour of your skin can very much be a life or death matter.
Instead of jumping in immediately, perhaps we should dip a toe in to test the waters. Perhaps we should do our reading about the construction of race in the West—because race is a social construct. Perhaps we ought to look deeply into the history of these concepts, and find a way to reconcile the usefulness of parts and the danger of others. Perhaps we simply need balance.
Footnotes
- There are a lot of goddesses being labelled ‘dark’ at present. They tend to rule over realms that map onto the dark/light binary as described here, such as death, ghosts, actions pertaining to the passions (such as violence and retribution), and witchcraft. Sometimes they are labelled as such based on their mythology, such as being considered evil in some texts. Examples of such goddesses include Hekate, Lilith (who is not always considered a goddess per se, but part of the Infernal Divine), The Morrígan, Nemesis, Hel, the Erinyes/Furies, and others.
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