The Dark God: Integrating the Abyss

“The person who renounces the world and refuses to pay life’s dues does not achieve individuation, because the dark God would find no place in him. In someone who seeks only light, the dark God would find no room.” ~Carl Jung (written May 16, 1961 just days before his death on June 6, 1961)

True individuation is not fluffy enlightenment; it is painful integration.

Loving light will not guide you out of existential darkness. Only facing the darkness itself will ever give you the ferocity, audacity, and courage needed to kindle your own light. And only that kindled light born out of your deepest darkness ever stands a chance at guiding you toward true individuation.

Pusillanimous placation leads only to tiny comfort zones reinforced by Pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking and calcifying cultural conditioning. You must be capable of breaking the bones of your blind belief. You must be capable of existential ninjitsu. Crack the skull of golden idol Dogma. Break the back of God!

Burn through the fossilization of your worth (courage). Piss on the ashes (audacity). Get your hands dirty and make clay out of your shame (humility). Create a new form out of the fecundity of your moxie and manure (rebirth). Then repeat as often as needed until you understand that everything always changes, that there is no permanence only presence, that there is no self only masks all the way down perceiving delusions all the way up, that there is no “truth” only the Truth Quest. Then repeat again.

Decapitate all gods, false or otherwise. Surf the wave of their blood into sacred nonattachment, elevated elan, megalithic metacognition. Carry their severed heads in your satchel like an existential Johnny Appleseed. Plant them in the manure of outdated reasoning and watch them blossom into New Gods, better Gods, healthier Gods. Then decapitate those gods as well. Keep the cycle going. It’s all you anyway, a tiny universe in motion like a wave out of an ocean. It’s all you disguising yourself as a human for a while.

Laugh at the mass destruction. Then rebuild. Always rebuild. Like a carpenter in an infinite hotel transforming would into could. Like a trickster tricking light out of darkness and darkness out of light. Like a scar actualizing its antifragility. Rebuild like a worldbuilder standing between worlds juxtaposing opposite worlds into sacred alignment. Rebuild like a God capable of destroying itself and rebuilding itself ad infinitum. Personify transformation. Embody the Phoenix.

Then double down with your newfound sense of humor on the whole absurd shitshow of it all. Laugh at the cosmic joke. Keep laughing until the abyss is laughing with you. Then grab the abyss by the throat and integrate the fucker. Tie its darkness to your lightheartedness. Split open its belly and plant the Godhead seed of your latest deicide into its guts. Then decide—balls to bones, ovaries to marrow—that you and the abyss, you and the existential darkness, your inner Jesus and your inner devil, your fat hungry Buddha and your lithe laughing Buddha, have always been one and the same thing.

As James Hollis said, “The shadow is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.” And now, finally, you are living it. After navigating the labyrinth of yourself, you finally see how you are both Minotaur and Theseus, dragon and dragonslayer, demon and angel, death and life. And from this sacred integration emerges the Dark God: the Great Mystery, the Dancing Nothing, The Blooming Haha, the Infinite Interconnectedness of all things.

This is not a separate evil deity but the unacknowledged, repressed, or split-off half of the divine totality. Jung argued that the biblical God-image (Yahweh) already contained this darkness (as explored in Answer to Job), and that true psychological wholeness requires integrating rather than denying it.

Why does the “Dark God” need a place in the human psyche? To become whole. To become spiritually adaptable. To become existentially flexible. To become healthy. To live in sacred nonattachment. Individuation is Jung's term for the lifelong process of becoming a whole, unique Self by consciously integrating unconscious contents—especially the shadow, anima/animus, and ultimately the archetype of the Self (which includes both light and dark poles).The person who “renounces the world” (i.e., avoids death anxiety, suffering, moral ambiguity, instinctual drives, relationships, creativity's cost, guilt, destruction, or any “dark” price of existence) lives in a one-sided, light-obsessed, spiritual-bypassing way.

They avoid the tragic, embodied, shadow-laden reality of being alive. By doing so, they leave no psychic space for their darkness to become conscious. They repress or exclude the shadow-side of the divine (and therefore of the Self). The result is pseudo-individuation or stalled development. The Self cannot constellate fully because wholeness requires both poles—light and dark, constructive and destructive, love and loss, energy and entropy, spirit and matter.

Jung often linked this to mythological motifs: Prometheus stealing fire (paying dearly for creativity), the crucified Christ (suffering as the price of divine-human union), or the alchemical nigredo (blackening/dark phase) that must precede transformation. Refusing the Dark God means refusing the alchemical fire that forges the individuated Self.

“When you see your matter going black, rejoice, for this is the beginning of the work.” ~Rosarium Philosophorum

Without room for this aspect, the personality remains split, inflated in false purity and spiritual sterility. True individuation demands bearing the cost—paying life's often painful dues—so the whole God-image (light + dark) can incarnate in the human psyche. This is the Dark God.

As Jung said, “One does not become whole by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

But celebrate! Your god-killing Question Mark Sword is always a necessity. It is an essential tool, even here (especially here) at the end of time. But this God, the Dark God, longs to be killed, it needs to be decapitated, it must be gutted like a fish lest its dogmatic guts stink up the joint, for it knows beyond all knowing that the journey must remain the thing despite any and all destinations.

Image source:

Abyss by Zhaoxin Mo

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (The Dark God: Integrating the Abyss) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.