The True Meaning of the Black Sun
There is a symbol that recurs often in the realm of esoterica, but whose meaning is largely misunderstood in modern times. Like many symbols found in either pre-Christian religion or broader occultism and mysticism, the Black Sun is a symbol that is associated with the Nazis because it was seen to have been adapted and recuperated by the Nazis. But the Nazi association belies its true meaning, which is far broader than the Nazi use of the name.
For starters, let’s get something straight: the symbol that is called Schwarze Sonne (“Black Sun”) or Sonnenrad (meaning “sun wheel”) by contemporary neo-Nazis is not actually an ancient symbol. Its design may have been adapted from an older symbol, but rather than being a symbol of a pre-Christian Germanic religion, the most likely candidate for such inspiration was probably a Merovingian ornamental disk, or Zierscheibe (“decorative disk”), simply representing the visible sun and its passage. That’s at least according to some scholars, though apparently it’s not really known if the Nazis attached any real significance to their sun wheel symbol. They may indeed have been based on an older form of jewellry dating back to the Iron Age, but it’s not clear what if any religious significance it had. At any rate, the Schwarze Sonne of the Nazis appears nowhere before the 20th century, and was invented by Wilhelm Landig as a substitute for the swastika and commssioned for Heinrich Himmler as part of his designs for Wewelsburg Castle. Apparently the Nazis believed that it was supposed to symbolize a source of mystic power and renewal for the “Aryan” race, which is definitely quite the leap from what might just have been a snazzy ornament (which they of course bastardized into a symbol of esoteric racism). But, before the Nazis came along, there was another, older Black Sun, one with an entirely different meaning to what the Nazis had in mind.
In alchemy, we see a symbol that is referred to in Latin as Sol Niger, literally meaning “Black Sun”. It is a symbol of the process of nigredo, the first stage of the alchemical process denoting a putrefaction or dissolution that constitutes the first stage of a process of purification of matter that leads to the creation of the philosopher’s stone. In a more symbolic sense, the process of nigredo can represent something like the dark night of the soul, a sort of depressive distillation of the soul/psyche that is part of the journey to spiritual awakening or the realization of faith. In general, Sol Niger tends to be a symbol somewhat associated with death, albeit a death that precedes rebirth and renewal, far from the Aryanist fantasies about it being a power source for the “master race”. It is perhaps the association with death and decay that leads some to link the symbol of Sol Niger to Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture and the planet of the same name, and it is here where things get really interesting.
Saturn, or Saturnus, was also considered a god of dissolution, renewal, as well as liberation. In Rome he was even sometimes identified with Dis Pater, the god of the underworld. It is thus only natural that he might be associated with death and decay, to the extent that he probably ended up having some influences on the Grim Reaper, the popular personification of death, with his scythe or sickle (though the proper Hellenic personification of death was Thanatos, known as Mors in Rome). Some modern commentators of myth also link Saturn with Mahakala, a wrathful manifestation of the Hindu god Shiva and one of the main wrathful deities of esoteric Buddhism. Saturn and Mahakala do have some things in common; both are associated with the colour black, both have some association with time (denoted by Mahakala’s namesake), both can be thought of as chthonic deities to a certain extent (see Bernard Faure’s Protector’s and Predators on the broad chthonic character of Daikokuten, the Japanese transmission of Mahakala), and both have a fairly clear association with death, with Mahakala sometimes being identified with/as death itself (though the name Mahakala is sometimes interpreted as meaning “Beyond Death”). The planet Saturn was also, in some contexts, associated with the underworld in the specific sense that it was seen as the “sun of night”. In ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, Saturn was strangely associated with the Sun, but was also believed to be black in colour, hence in a way it was to them a black sun. This idea was also linked to a myth concerning Shamash, the Babylonian sun god known elsewhere as Utu, who somtimes travelled beneath the earth to the realm of Arallu, the kingdom of the underworld abundant with gold, to fulfill his function as the supreme judge of the dead.
https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2021/04/17/the-true-meaning-of-the-black-sun/
The “black sun” is shining in Ukraine
https://eurasia-news-online.com/2022/03/22/the-black-sun-is-shining-in-ukraine/
