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Internet Book of Shadows, (Various Authors), [1999], at sacred-texts.com
The Dark Night of the Soul
Fra.: Apfelmann
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"The Dark Night of the Soul" is the name given to that experience
of spiritual desolation that all students of the Occult pass through
at one time or another. It is sometimes charcterised by feelings that
your occult studies or practises are not taken you anywhere, that the
initial success that one is sometimes granted after a few months of
occult working, has suddenly dried up. There comes a desire to give up
on everything, to abandon exercises and meditation, as nothing seems
to be working. St.John of the Cross. a christian mystic, said of this
experience, that it; "...puts the sensory spiritual appetites to
sleep, deadens them, and deprives them of the ability to find pleas-
ure in anything. It binds the imagination, and impeeds it from doing
any good discursive work. It makes the memory cease, the intellect
become dark and unable to understand anything, and hence it causes
the will to become arrid and constrained, and all the faculties empty
and useless. And over this hangs a dense and burdensome cloud, which
afflicts the soul, and keeps it withdrawn from the good."
Though the beginner may view the onset of such an experience with
alarm (I know I did), the "Dark Night" is not something bad or destr-
uctive. In one sense it may be seen as a trial, a test by which the
Gods examine our resolve to continue with occult work, and if you are
not completely whole-hearted about your magical studies, it is during
this period (at its beginning) that you will give up. The Dark Night
of the Soul should be welcomened, once recognised for what it is (I
have always received an innate "warning" just before the onset of such
a period), as a person might welcome an operation that will secure
health and wellbeing. St.John of the Cross embraced the soul`s Dark
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Night as a Devine Appointment, calling it a period of "sheer grace"
and adding;
"O guiding Night,
O Night more lovely than Dawn,
O Night that has united the lover with his beloved
Transforming the Lover in her Beloved."
When entering the Dark Night one is overcome by a sense of
spiritual dryness and depression. The notion, in some quarters, that
all such experiences should be avoided, for a peaceful existence,
shows up the superficiality of so much of contemporary living. The
Dark Night is a way of bringing the Soul to stillness, so that deep
psychic transformation may take place. All distractions must be set
aside, and it is no good attempting to fight or channel the bursts of
raw energy that from time to time may course through your being. This
inner compulsion to set everything aside results in the outer depres-
sion, when nothing seems to excite.
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The only thing to do is obey your inner voice and become still,
waiting for the inner transformation, (which the "Dark Night" heralds-
), to take place. You may not be aware for a very long time of the
results of that inner change, but when the desire to work comes again
and the depression lifts, the Dark Night has (for a moment) passed. No
one can help during this time, and in many cases there is hardly
anyone to turn for advice. One must disregard the well-meaning advice
of family and friends to "snap out of it" this is no ordinary depres-
sion, but a deep spiritual experience which only those who have passed
through themselves (in other words to a magical retreat) but for many,
as the routines of everyday life prohibits this, all you can do is
cultivate an inner solitude, a stillness and silence of heart, and
wait, (like a chrysalis waits for the inner changes that will result
in a butterfly) for the Transformation to work itself out. There are
many such "Dark Nights" that the occult seeker must pass through
during the mysterious process of mitigation. They are all trials but
experience teaches one to cope more efficiently.
With fractalic greetings and laughter * Fra.: Apfelmann *
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