Aurora Consurgens

PERFEITO

I’ve never been a fan of Dr. Von Franz. When reading her, I always feel trapped in a school-room, while a well-intentioned school teacher goes point by point though what what she obviously believes to be a very important lesson, while outside through an open window, the seabirds are shrieking, the waves are crashing, one can even feel the salt-spray beading on your skin. All you can do is sneak out a pocket edition of Robinson Jeffers and read it under the desk. Robinson Jeffers .... or this book! It’s pure prose poetry, pure nature poetry in the text, and Dr. Von Franz’s commentary in support and illumination of the text seems, to me, on fire, as if that teacher, inspired by the moment, has put away her prepared notes and started reading poetry with a Sybil like voice. Scholars have supposedly discredited the notion that St. Thomas himself composed the text in the mystical, perhaps, post-stroke state, in which he declaimed ‘All I’ve written is as straw’. Perhaps. But textual scholars sometimes overweight the text itself to the neglect of an imaginative prehension of the times in which the author lived and wrote. St. Thomas’ era was the era in which a new vital, invigorating worldliness, almost Classical Greek in nature, awakened the world, the Hohenstaufen Renaissance, as it’s been called, the time of Frederick the Great, ‘Stupor Mundi’, and of his advisor Michael Scot, the Alchemist, Scientist and Statesman, the arrival in the West of translations of Aristotle from the far more advanced and civilized Arab world. The Western World woke up as if from a longstanding Platonic, neo-Platonic, Dionysus the Areopagite inspired sleep. If we think of Alchemy less as some kind of Medieval science of personality development, though in part it surely was, and a method of Spiritual Discipline too (see Titus Burckhardt’s splendid interpretative work) and more as a manifestation of a renewed, spring-like engagement with the world, then it doesn’t seem far-fetched at all that St. Thomas who chanted the poetry of the Latin Mass nearly every day of his life, St. Thomas whose teacher was Albert the Great, renowned as a great philosopher and Alchemist, St. Thomas who was born and died during the era that he did, the Hohenstaufen Renaissance, near the end of this, composed Aurora Consurgens, this marvelous text in a vision and with a language that is more exultant Canticle than anything else. Dr. Von Franz intended this volume as a companion to Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis. It is. And it is exceptional!

Fit for academical study, with interesant -though always arguable- Junguian commentaries by Marie-Louise von Franz, it is a great acquisition for those interested in Alchemy, in Psychology, or in History of Thought.

In JesusChrist we go to GOD TOP-DOWN !!! With alchemy we go to GOD BOTTOM-UP !!! S H A L O M !!! Fernando Romero Alias FErnandEL [...]

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?