Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy : A Companion Work to C.G. Jung's Mysterium Conjunctionis (Studies in Jungian Psychology)

Rating:
Summary: Neatly organized and clear commentary by Von Franz
Review: No one really knows who wrote the astonishing thirteenth-century treatise RISING DAWN (Aurora Consurgens), although the work is attributed to Thomas Aquinas, an attribution the Catholic Church has been at pains to deny. This translation starts with the text (it reads like a series of revelations and parables steeped in biblical quotations) followed by the depth-psychological commentary of von Franz. Of all the second-generation Jungians, perhaps only Edward Edinger matches her in clarity. In brilliance no one does.

Quite a few Jungians of my acquaintance haven't read this book even though it was intended as a supplement to Jung's MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS, the last of his longer works and his last word on the relationship between alchemy and the unconscious. Perhaps it's because the book is not an alchemical treatise; it is, as the commentator notes in an introduction, a rush of revelation by a man who resorted to both Christian and alchemical symbolism to come to grips with what must have been an overpowering confrontation with the numen--in this case Sophia, the Gnostic goddess of Wisdom and, in the Old Testament, the feminine counterpart to God.

As I read, however, I found myself continually distracted by the damnable Jungian habit of footnoting everything (a dozen per page) as well as by the commentator's inability to write one page without quoting Jung: a sad and unfortunate habit given her obvious wealth of knowledge and psychological depth. It's clear too that she did an enormous amount of theological and alchemical research and, I suspect, furnished Jung with a fair bulk of what showed up in his tomes on the art of alchemy.

Although this doesn't count against the book's commentary, this doctor of depth psychology finds himself wondering why none of the psychological interpretations take Sophia, the metals, and the Earth at their word. Again and again, references to the aliveness of these substances are interpreted as the alchemist's projection onto matter. But what if the alchemist wasn't projecting?