von Franz (Aurora) – Introdução

As C. G. Jung   has shown in Psychology and Alchemy  , the early Latin texts of Western alchemy  , like the earlier Greek and Arabic ones, were written in a frame of mind   which caused the alchemist, seeking the divine secret of matter, to project his own unconscious into the unknown nature of chemical substances. These early texts have therefore become, for us, documents of the greatest value in regard to the formation of symbols in general and the individuation process in particular, whereas their chemical content is of significance only from the historical point of view. Although they were written before the time when alchemy split into chemistry on the one hand and hermeneutics on the other, some of the texts lay more stress on τα φυσικά, the “physical” or “chemical” aspect of the opus, while others give prominence to τα μυστικά, its “mystical” side, and therefore have a more “psychological” significance. Among those texts whose significance is almost exclusively psychological we must reckon the treatise entitled Aurora   Consurgens, which, both in content and style, occupies a unique place in the alchemical literature of its time. Jung was the first to discover the importance of this treatise, and he discussed it briefly in Psychology and Alchemy. Whereas other texts only occasionally cite conventional passages from the Holy Scriptures  , this treatise is composed almost entirely of Biblical quotations, whose “alchemical” meaning is hinted at by the interpolation of quotations from classical alchemy. We must therefore suppose that whatever the author may have understood by “alchemy,” he was trying to describe, or give shape to, a religious experience or—in psychological terms—an immediate experience of the unconscious. The treatise was considered “blasphemous” by a later, “enlightened” age, but to me it seems beyond doubt that the author was passionately serious and was attempting to express a mysterium ineffabile.

It is perhaps no accident that the most frequently quoted passages from the Old Testament are those in which the mysterious figure of Sapientia   Dei  —Wisdom—plays a central role. This Gnostic figure is the chief protagonist, and she is identified with Many and with the “soul in matter.” The anima   functions as the mediator in any experience of the unconscious; she is the first content to cross the threshold, and she transmits to consciousness   those images from the unconscious which compensate the orthodox Christian ideas that dominate our conscious view of the world. In view of the recent solemn declaration of the dogma   of the Assumption of the Virgin, one cannot but regard the glorification of a divine female figure in Aurora as a prophetic presentiment of coming events. But behind this figure we catch glimpses of the abyss   of the nigredo, of the psychological shadow and chthonic man, whose integration has begun to present ethics with some troublesome questions. At all events the problem of darkness, as the text and commentary will show, is touched upon in the Aurora though it is not solved.

The treatise is traditionally attributed to Thomas Aquinas  — an attribution so surprising and, at first sight, so unlikely that hitherto it has never been taken seriously. This is due. among other things, to the fact that the importance of the treatise was not recognized before. The pros and cons of the attribution will not be discussed at this point, but only after we have given the commentary on the text. Whoever the author may have been, he was a man who was vouchsafed an overpowering revelation of the unconscious, which he was unable to describe in the usual ecclesiastical style but only with the help of alchemical symbols. The treatise has about it an air of strangeness and loneliness— which, it may be, touched and isolated the author himself.