The Seba library treats Auspices in 7 passages, across 6 authors (including Edinger, Edward F., Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Benveniste, Émile).
The major collective religious operation of antiquity that epitomizes the nature of that early relation to the Self is the ceremony of taking the auspices.
Edinger identifies the auspices as the paradigmatic ritual form through which the ancient ego related to the Self — a watchful, propitiatory attentiveness to the numinous powers-that-be.
, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996thesis
the reality of the auspices has fallen into contempt, only the outward show being retained; and in consequence highly important departments of public administration…are carried on without any auspices at all.
Cicero argues that the practical abandonment of genuine augural consultation, while retaining its ceremonial shell, has led directly to the collapse of proper governance and military conduct.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45thesis
Romulum auspiciis Numam sacris constitutis fundamenta iecisse nostrae civitatis, quae numquam profecto sine summa placatione deorum immortalium tanta esse potuisset.
Cicero presents Romulus’s founding of Rome through the auspices as inseparable from the city’s greatness, equating proper religious consultation with civic and political legitimacy.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
the notion of ‘authority’ came to be derived from a root which simply means ‘grow, increase’…the fact that in Indo-Iranian the root aug- means ‘might’ is noteworthy.
Benveniste traces the linguistic root shared by augur and auctoritas to a primary sense of divine might, establishing that the augur’s authority derives from channeling sacred power rather than merely observing signs.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
William Griffith Wilson and other early A. A. members saw it taking place within the Oxford Group, and so they left those auspices.
Kurtz employs ‘auspices’ in its institutional sense to describe A.A.’s decisive separation from the Oxford Group, mapping the term’s sacral logic of patronage onto a modern organizational rupture.
, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010supporting
lecture given at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, 21 November 1974, under the auspices of the Analytical Psychology Club, London
Hillman’s footnote uses ‘auspices’ in its conventional institutional sense, indicating organizational sponsorship of a scholarly lecture on alchemy and Jungian thought.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside
Extispicy, as divining from the exta of sacrificed animals is called, becomes the most important type of induced analog augury during the first millennium B.C.
Jaynes contextualizes augury within the broader breakdown of the bicameral mind, treating animal divination as a compensatory technique for accessing the now-silent voices of the gods.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside