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.
October 10, 2005

Neatly organized and clear commentary by Von Franz

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?
September 01, 2004

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Alchemical Active Imagination: Revised Edition (C. G. Jung Foundation Books)
by Marie-Louise von Franz

Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940 (Jung Seminars)
by C. G. Jung
by Lorenz Jung, Maria Meyer-Grass, Ernst Falzeder, Tony Woolfson

Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.14)
by C. G. Jung
by Gerhard Adler, R. F.C. Hull

Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology (Studies in Jungian Psychology)
by Marie-Louise Von Franz

Alchemical Studies (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.13)
by C. G. Jung
by Gerhard Adler, R. F.C. Hull