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Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem
Aurora Consurgens
Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy is marie-louise-von-franz‘s translation, edition, and psychological commentary on a medieval alchemical treatise. Published in 1966 in the Bollingen Series (translated with R.F.C. Hull and A.S.B. Glover), the volume exists as the formal completion of carl-jung‘s jung-mysterium-coniunctionis — Jung having assigned von Franz the fourteenth chapter as the close of his own magnum opus. The pairing is unusual in the analytical-psychological canon: Jung and his closest student writing two halves of one book.
The Aurora itself is a late-medieval Latin text, attributed in the manuscript tradition to Thomas Aquinas (on his deathbed, per legend), treating the figure of Sapientia as the feminine wisdom that unites the opposites in the alchemical opus. For Jung and von Franz, the text belonged to those “religious undercurrents in a particular cultural setting which were of an introverted cast and which were in search of direct experience” (von Franz 1975, His Myth in Our Time) — the stream that runs from the Kabbalists and the Sufi gnostics through Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lull, and the Paracelsian tradition. Von Franz’s commentary reads the text’s imagery of Sapientia, the coniunctio oppositorum, and the bride of the Canticle as the symbolic substrate of the individuation process.
The work is technical; it is the densest document in her alchemical corpus. It is also her single most Jung-embedded text — the volume where the master and the continuator do not merely collaborate but share authorship of one argument.