What is Black Sun?

What is Black Sun?

The sun is yellow.

The sky is blue.

Black Sun is a periodic journal that seeks to challenge conventional wisdom and stereotypes which seem on the surface to be as true and obvious as these. The title is taken from a song by Dead Can Dance from the album Aion. It expresses the existential pain of the unlived and unexplored life. We are the living dead if we don’t challenge the crushing weight of conventions that rule our lives. Our minds are the most ingenious prisons ever designed, and by our unquestioning acceptance of the social order, we have slammed shut the prison door.

I don’t have the antidote to existential pain, or any particular answers to the BIG questions of life. But I have developed the willingness to question all prior assumptions. My rule is: the more something is taken for granted by large numbers of people, the more it needs to be examined and questioned. Tyranny of the majority is no better than tyranny of despots. It is just more accepted and easily tolerated, the iron fist in a velvet glove.

What despots and majorities fear most is the light (or darkness) of their own truth. And in a world of might makes right, those on top attempt to stay “in the sun”, not revealing their dark deeds. So the intent of Black Sun is to literally cast a shadow onto the supposed best and brightest among us. For we all have our shadow. We learn most about ourselves when we look at it and forge relationship with it. By avoiding our shadow, we become weak, like the fable of the boy who was literally afraid of it. We become encrusted and mired behind the walls we build obsessively ever higher, to avoid seeing the truth of our existence. Each and every one of us contains not only the potential for great works and nobility, but also the potential for the most monstrous deeds and vile depths of depravity. By accepting and embracing our dual nature, we can be honest with ourselves, and better understand our motives. We become strong. And perhaps we can gain a better perspective on why others act the way they do.

Therefore, Black Sun crosses many boundaries. One of the oldest rules of “polite conversation” is that you do not discuss religion, politics, or sex. So what’s left? Sports, fashion, and weather?

Black sun will deliberately violate this and other “polite” conventions. It is not specifically a political journal, but it will take issue with political hypocrisies right and left. It is not expressly religious or spiritual, but it will examine individual soul work and personal spirituality (introspection), and it will take issue with those who use religious concepts to build their own self-serving empires of money and power. And it will guffaw at those in power who seek to define and shape sexual “morality” for society while they engage in their own sexual deceptions.

Black Sun will also seek to showcase art and creativity that is above and beyond the conventional. I will review books, movies, and music that step outside the dominant culture. I will look for stories about courageous people who have forged their own paths and gone against the grain. It is the individual in touch with their soul and creative self who is the real hero of this world. It is the individual who makes their mark for better or worse who, on their deathbed, can say they truly lived.

This is the Black Sun, in a white world.

Welcome!

Sean Prophet, August 23, 2001

Black Sun
by Brendan Perry, Lisa Gerard

Murder! Man on fire.
Murder! I’ve seen the eyes of the living dead.
It’s the same old game. Survival.
The great mass play a waiting game.
Embalmed, crippled, dying in fear of pain, all sense of freedom gone.
Black sun in a white world.
Like having a black son in a white world.
I have a son, his name is Eden.
It’s his birthright beyond estranged times.
Give me 69 years, another season in this hell.
It’s all sex and death as far as eyes can tell.
Like Prometheus we are bound.
Chained to this rock of a brave new world.
Our god forsaken lot.
And I feel that’s all we have ever needed to know
Until worlds end and the seas run cold
Give me 69 years, another season in this hell.
There is sex and death in mother natures plans.

Note: The musical Black Sun concept that resonates for me is Dead Can Dance, and not “Black Hole Sun” from Soundgarden.
–Sean Prophet, August 2022