What the Burned Forest Knows about the Shadow
Part II: On the Hidden Unity of Hermetic Philosophy, Jungian Psychology, and the Living World
Note: One should watch the 2019 Disney movie, The Lion King, before reading.
Most people remember the wrong moment in the movie, The Lion King.
The climax is the fight at the edge of Pride Rock — Simba and Scar circling each other in the rain and firelight, the kingdom hanging in the balance, the rightful king finally claiming what was taken from him. It is visually spectacular but it is not, in any meaningful psychological sense, the transformation.
The transformation happened earlier. Quietly. In the dark.
It happened in the moment Simba stopped running from the memory of his father’s death and turned to face what he had been carrying for his entire adult life — the belief that he caused it, that he was responsible, that the identity he had built with Timon and Pumbaa in the jungle was not freedom but the longest possible detour away from something he could not bring himself to see. The fight with Scar was simply what became possible once that confrontation had already occurred. You cannot fight what you have not yet faced. You can only keep running.
What Simba went through has a name in Jungian psychology: Shadow work. And the stages it moved through have a name in an alchemical tradition that predates Jung by four centuries: the Great Work.
Both are describing the same process described in Hermeticism. And so, it turns out, mirrors the process a forest takes after a fire.
A True Story: On Black Mold
Like Simba, my father who was also a writer passed away when I was young. Mine passed away from multiple myeloma, at the age of 58. Like my father, I was also diagnosed with a disease at the same time as him in 2020. However, mine was not cancer but a potentially fatal autoimmune disease called vasculitis (GPA) which likely was triggered by black mold in my apartment. While my father was hospitalized, I was dealing with this health issue that resulted in significant disability—it affected my lungs, sinuses, eyes, and joints.
In short, I moved out of that apartment which was ironically next to a graveyard and started the Great Work of gradually improving my health with treatment. Whether that black mold had anything to do with my father’s cancer or my condition, that will never be known. All that is certain is that he visited me in that apartment exactly one year before his death.
I was also involved in a car accident exactly 5 months and 5 days after his death. By some miracle, I was not seriously injured even though my car, the one I bought in the same city of the mold-infested apartment, was totaled.
From these experiences, I argue that shadow work is not only necessary for our mental health but also our physical health. As an example, a person can be labeled a narcissist but even if true, this judgment often prevents someone from openly seeking the mental healthcare they need.
Instead of going through the Great Work, my father turned to opioid substances as a way to avoid negative feelings. The mistake he made was not seeking pain medicine but depending on it to maintain his sense of self-worth even in the absence of physical pain. In alchemical terms, he was stuck at the albedo and never passed this stage. Now let’s discuss the stages in more detail.
The Four Stages of the Great Work
The Great Work, often symbolized by the Cross, moves through four stages. This is telling given “The Devil” has a destiny number of 4. The alchemists gave them Latin names, but their meaning is immediately recognizable once translated:
Nigredo — the blackening. The dissolution of the starting material into darkness, the disease, the suffering. This is what black mold symbolizes. Everything that was established breaks down. The crucible holds nothing but ash and undifferentiated matter. This stage feels like destruction. It is not.
Albedo — the whitening. From the dissolved material, something new begins to emerge — purified, simplified, stripped of everything that was false. The pioneer of the transformation. Not yet the destination, but the necessary precondition for it. This is what seeking healing and/or therapy represents.
Citrinitas — the yellowing. The dawning of a new consciousness. The first light after the long dark. Something becomes visible that the darkness concealed — not invented, but revealed. This is what “remission” from a mental condition or physical disease represents. The truth starts to transform from a conscious belief to a subconscious one but the progress can still be reversed by one’s actions.
Rubedo — the reddening. The integration of everything the Work produced into a unified whole. The full expression of the transformation in the world — not as an inner event but as a way of being, embodied and sustained. This step can only be done in relationships with other people.
The Rubedo is what embodiment of the authentic self represents on a psychological level. In Christian symbolism, this is the Resurrection of Christ. New Age believers call it by the terms “spiritual awakening” or “Ascension.”
The central claim of the alchemical tradition — the claim that Jung found confirmed in his clinical work across forty years — is that these stages cannot be reordered, accelerated, or skipped. The darkness is not the obstacle to the Work. It is the Work itself—bringing light into darkness.
What Happens After a Forest Fire
The natural world enacts the same four-stage sequence every time a forest burns, a flood recedes, or a fallen tree opens a gap in the canopy. Ecologists call it succession — the process by which a disturbed ecosystem rebuilds itself through progressive stages toward complexity. They did not read alchemy. They observed forests. They arrived at the same map.
Nigredo — the burned clearing. After fire passes through a forest, the landscape enters its blackening phase. The previous structure is dissolved. The ground is bare, dark, and exposed. Everything established is gone — the canopy, the shrub layer, the accumulated organic matter of decades. It looks, to every instinct the human eye has, like pure loss.
Albedo — the pioneer phase. Fireweed arrives first, pushing through ash within weeks of the fire’s passing. Then bracken fern, wind-seeded grasses, the opportunistic species that can tolerate exposure and scarcity. These are not the forest. They are the forest’s purification stage — stabilizing the soil, adding organic matter, creating the micro-conditions that will eventually make their own displacement possible.
Citrinitas — the dawning complexity. Shrubs arrive. Then the first young trees, establishing themselves in the improved soil the pioneers prepared. Insects diversify. Birds follow the insects. The system begins to develop texture — layering, interdependence, the quality of organized complexity that the bare clearing could not support.
Rubedo — the climax community. The old growth forest, fully realized. The canopy closed, the understory layered, the mycorrhizal network deep and complex, the system dynamically balanced and capable of resilience in the face of gradual changes in the environment.
The ecological insight mirrors the alchemical one: you cannot plant an old growth forest. You cannot skip the pioneer phase and arrive at the climax community. The burned clearing is not the obstacle to the forest. It is the forest’s beginning.
Simba’s Four Stages as a Mirror
Return now to the Pride Lands — and to a lion who spent years mistaking his nigredo stage for his permanent life.
Nigredo — the exile. After Mufasa’s death, Simba runs. His identity dissolves with his father — the cub who was loved, who was chosen, who was going to be king. What remains is the blackened ground of a belief he cannot examine: that he caused his father’s death, that he deserves to be nowhere near the Pride Lands, that running is the only rational response to the guilt he carries.
Albedo — the wilderness years. Timon and Pumbaa are Simba’s pioneer species. Hakuna Matata is the albedo — the purification phase, the necessary stabilization that allows survival without resolving the underlying dissolution. It is real. It is necessary. It creates the conditions for what comes next. But it is not the destination.
Citrinitas — the vision. Rafiki finds Simba and shows him his reflection in the water. Mufasa’s voice comes through the stars. Remember who you are. This is the citrinitas — not action, not integration, not the fight that comes after, but the dawning of clear seeing.
Rubedo — the return. The confrontation with Scar is the rubedo: not the inner transformation, which is already complete, but the living of it in the world. The integration expressed as action, identity embodied rather than merely understood and acknowledged. This is what the rubedo always looks like — not a dramatic inner event but the outer expression of what the inner Work already produced.
Simba does not win the fight because he is stronger than Scar. He wins it because he is no longer running from himself. Instead of falling and succumbing to fear, he gained his strength and assumed his rightful place as The Lion King.
In the same way that unexpected miracle happened to Simba, so it can happen to us individually through our mental and physical health when we complete the alchemical process and embody our authentic selves without feelings of guilt or shame.
The Seed Bank is Still There
Return one last time to the burned clearing after the battle between Simba and Scar.
The rain that happens afterwards is not coincidence, it is symbolic of letting go what no longer serves us, even if it is a family member. The beliefs of guilt, shame, and loss must be let go before true self-empowerment can take root.
Beneath the black ground, beneath what looks from the surface like total loss, the seed bank is intact. Everything the forest needs to become itself again is already present in the soil — not as potential but as actuality, held in dormancy by the conditions that preceded the fire and now released by the very conditions the fire created. The darkness is not the end of the story. It is the story’s necessary beginning.
The same is true of ourselves. Beneath the prima materia of the Shadow, beneath the dissolution of the nigredo, the Self is intact. The Great Work is not the acquisition of something new. It is the extraction of what was always there — waiting in the seed bank of the unconscious for the conditions that would finally allow it to germinate.
We can look at The Lion King for inspiration: Simba did not become king by winning the fight with Scar. He became king by remembering who he really is—an intelligent and compassionate lion.
Rafiki marked his forehead with a “7” and this matches the destiny number of the words: “Remember,” “Nature,” and “intelligence.”
Angel Number 777, the three roars, likely is code for “Remember your intelligence”
When we add 7 three times, we get 21 and this reduces to 3. This is how we enter the Kingdom: the term “Kingdom of God” has a Destiny number of 3.
The three lions that roared after him can represent the trinity of body, mind, and spirit that symbolizes the Divine in three forms within nature. And since we are interconnected with nature, one can make the logical conclusion that the Kingdom of God is within you. It happens when the mind and spirit work together within the human brain, a vital organ of the body.
Simba offered him mercy, compassion and grace. But Scar rejected it. Ironically, Scar’s lack of humility led to his (literal) downfall as he did not pass the Albedo stage. As above, so below. This phrase has the same destiny number (3) as the word “Albedo.”
Likewise, Mother Earth also has boundaries. It acts to maintain dynamic equilibrium. And that does mean, in many cases, natural disasters like wildfires that literally light up the sky and burn down the structures we worked so hard to build. In truth, Mother Earth has already won this battle, and climate change is the result of what happens when we disturb the balance of nature.
Artificial intelligence alone will not cause a spiritual awakening. The only long-term solution is to change our minds about our relationship with nature, one person at a time. This is what the HealthyLiger Essays publication, our Great Work, is truly about. In numerology, our publication name happens to share the same destiny number of the term “shadow work.” This was coincidental, not intentional.
As you can probably tell, the numerology inferences I made are not from AI. Humans think in a more intuitive way, and our intuition should be embraced in any creative endeavors. At the Rubedo stage, logic and intuition naturally work together.
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What stage of the Great Work do you recognize yourself in right now — the burned clearing, the pioneer phase, the dawning clarity, or the integration? I’d love to hear what this framework surfaces in the comments.