I’ve written about symbols visible in Celetna Street in Prague – The Black Madonna, the White Peacock and the Powder Tower. At No 8, you can see a decorative Baroque symbol of a Black Sun.

The building was an early Gothic house which was later expanded and adapted. The current facade dates back to the late 18th century when the owners had it reconstructed¹.

The Black Sun was a Nazi symbol but the one in Prague is much older than that.

We can also exclude references from native South American mythology. They believed there must be two suns – the bright day time Sun and the dark night-time Sun. It’s an interesting belief but not the one we’re looking for here.

As frequent readers of this website may have suspected, the connection to Prague is in alchemy. The Sun has many uses in symbolical form and can mean gold, a king, a fiery spirit, sulphur, enlightenment. This is where my natural skepticism starts to kick in. If there can be many interpretations to a symbol, then who’s to say which interpretation is the right one?

It is possible that the Black Sun refers to the alchemists’ first stage of nigredo – The Blackening.  I’m not sure this makes sense. Walking along Celetna from the Powder Tower means that when we reach #10, we see the second alchemists’ stage represented by a white peacock. This would suggest that the pattern is reversed or out of sync.

Perhaps it reminds the budding alchemist that nigredo is not yet over, despite the white peacock. In this respect, it is a sign that one should not get ahead of oneself in the path to enlightenment.

References

1. At the Black Sun; Kralovska Cesta; (Retrieved 2018-05-13) [↩]

Remember: links were correct at time of publication.