Alchemy Course: Salt, Black and Blue

Course Description

James Hillman was a past master of alchemical psychology. This field uses metaphors derived from ancient alchemy to elucidate deep structures in the creative imagination. We tend to forget that creative processes are not random. Imagination embodies along lines that become apparent when we ponder the frequently incomprehensible images of alchemy.

The book, Alchemical Psychology, covers a lifetime of studies and is quite difficult to read by someone who is not deeply steeped in alchemy, the work of C.G. Jung or James Hillman. Robert Bosnak and Patricia Berry have studied these thinkers for well over 40 years.

James Hillman was the primary training analyst of Robert Bosnak, who developed the field of embodied imagination: the way in which images can be felt in the body and shape our embodied condition. Patricia Berry was among the early founders of Archetypal Psychology beginning in the mid-1960s in Zurich, Switzerland. She was companion and spouse of James Hillman for 20 years.

This course goes through Alchemical Psychology and engages with the chapters Salt, Black and Blue page by page – and frequently line by line – sometimes dropping even between the lines into the great mystery itself. For those who have tasted these mysteries, there is no way back. One is haunted by them for life. It was so with Jung, Hillman, and with Bosnak and Berry as well. It will happen to you if you’re open to it.

This course is ideal if

• Feeling down or feeling blue
• Depression in all its forms
• Any form of pain or suffering related to loss, heartbreak or grief

Course Overview

Salt, Black, and Blue

This course invites you into an embodied encounter with three alchemical presences—Salt, Black, and Blue.

We begin with Salt, the subtle substance that stabilizes and gives form to experience. Salt contracts, preserves, and makes things matter. It brings tears into focus and grounds pain as soul food. Salt does not interpret—it engraves. You are invited to engage with its presence not as metaphor, but as a living force that sharpens awareness, reveals essence, and anchors the psychic body.

Black is the color of collapse and decomposition. Yet this dark phase—known as the nigredo—is not a mistake but a necessary corruption of what is too fixed or familiar. It empties out the illusions of daylight, dissolving identity, meaning, and comfort. This descent into darkness does not seek salvation. It makes way for the void and honors the wisdom of unknowing. Black is not something to escape, but something to enter.

Out of the black, Blue emerges. Blue brings a slowing down, a deepening. It is the mood of the world when touched by soul. Here, imagination is no longer ours—it belongs to the presences around us. Blue is the shimmer that arises when the literal dissolves, when insight becomes shaded by sadness, and when beauty does not brighten, but darkens. It is the color of fidelity, of the world as it sings quietly to itself.

Through these three classes, you will be invited into a slower, more sensate mode of reflection. The readings are paired with experiential suggestions, allowing these presences to work on you. You will not leave with conclusions, but with something more lasting: a changed interior, a clearer taste for soul.

 

Further courses on the subsequent chapters of Alchemical Psychology are also available on Jung Platform:

• • Alchemy course: The imagination of Air and the Azure Vault
  • Alchemy course: Yellowing and the Stone
  • Alchemy course : Silver and the White Earth
  • Alchemy course: Embodying James Hillman Alchemical Psychology

 

By the end of this course, you will

• Have a more empathic understanding of - and some practical tools to work with - your own as well as other people’s ‘blues’, depression and different forms of suffering.