24th October 2007
I am going to spend as much time as I can make available over the next week or so to investigate the iconography of the
Aurora consurgens manuscripts. This is one of the earliest alchemical manuscripts with illustrations dating to the early 15th century. There appears to be almost nothing written about this work in English, apart from the Marie-Louise von Franz book on the
Aurora consurgens which is frustrating in that she entirely ignores the illustrations and focusses on the first part of the text and provides a massive commentary which draws the reader into a mass of Jungian interpretations. She focusses our attention on the existential/religious content of the text and chooses only to translate one part of the text associated with this work.
9 Jan 2008
Yesterday my spirits were lifted later in the day by the postman delivering a book. I had been trying to get hold of a copy of this for some months from a bookshop in Italy but they were very slow in getting it to me. It contains a translation of the text of the
Aurora consurgens. As I indicated here, back in November I decided to embark on a quest to understand and contextualise the imagery of the
Aurora consurgens, one of the most mysterious of early alchemical emblematic manuscripts. The work is well known through the Marie-Louise von Franz book, however, few people realise just how misleading her book is, as she focusses on only one section of the text and mines it for Jungian concepts rather than placing it in its proper context. Thus her book, for me, throws little light on the true nature of the
Aurora consurgens.
18 Jan 2008
I have long been looking for someone to translate a key work, on what we might describe as spiritual alchemy. This is the
Philosophia speculativa by Gerhardt Dorn, written in the closing decades of the 16th century. Small pieces of this were translated by Jung and von Franz and quoted in their books, however, I am very aware that these translations are not accurate, but seem to filter Dorn's ideas through Jungian constructs. What this needs is for someone to translate it literally from the Latin, so that we can get a clearer picture of what Dorn was trying to say, rather than what the Jungians wish to gloss into his text.
25 August 2009
Back in the 1970's I was much impressed by the amazing early alchemical manuscript the
Aurora consurgens. This I knew through a few of the illuminated drawings which had appeared as illustrations in some books available to me at that time. Around 1980 I managed to obtain a copy of the Marie-Louise von Franz edition. Despite the influence which Jungian ideas held on me in those days I remember being deeply disappointed by the volume. Somehow it did not seem to give me any answers. The von Franz translation of the text amounted to about 50 pages in her lengthy book of 500 pages. She was conextualising the work within Jungian ideas, which was not inimical to me in those days, but her lengthy excursions into the complexities of Christian ideas of the fourteenth century, left me rather puzzled. I left her book confused, feeling I had missed something. Her book also did not deal in any way with the imagery on the thirty or so coloured drawings. Recently I discovered that she had only translated half the text. She had left out Part II, the alchemical section which comments on the drawings, dismissing this as unworthy of her consideration and saying in her Introduction "In contrast to the entirely original, poetico-rhetorical, confessional style of Part I, Part II has a prosaically didactic character which follows the usual style of the contemporary alchemical treatises". So she cut off the alchemy from this work. Over the last few years a number of people have written to me asking which part of the
Aurora consurgens refers to the illustrations, as they are puzzled by the lack of mention of this in von Franz' book. So I have now decided to translate the full text and issue it in my Magnum Opus series. Yesterday I made a start and will work on it when time becomes available over the next few months, so that we will soon be able to read the complete work and not the truncated version with which the Jungians have presented us. I find I like "the usual style of the contemporary alchemical treatises".
26 August 2009
Following on my thoughts upon the von Franz edition of the
Aurora consurgens I wonder now if the reason for her leaving out the second part was that she somehow considered that it did not mesh well with the Jungian ideas she was pursuing and did not support the main thesis of her commentary, that the
Aurora consurgens contained a record in Jungian terms of a psychic process going on in the writer of the work (possibly Thomas Aquinas), some kind of abnormal state of mind that produced an eruption of the contents of the writer's unconscious. The second part is equally imaginative as the first, but is within the tradition and conventions of alchemical material and thus not really to be seen as a spontaneous emergence occasioned by some abnormal psychic state, but rather something more thought out, based within the traditional style of alchemical writings. Her decision not to mention or show the illustrations could have arisen from the fact that she would then have had to include the alchemical text of Part II as it comments on the imagery. The Jungians always use alchemy as a support for their psychological theories rather than allowing the alchemical work to speak for itself within its own terms and proper context. Jungian interpretations of alchemical works can be an obstacle to our understanding of these. So I am determined to let the
Aurora consurgens now speak for itself.
31 August 2009
I have made some progress with translating the alchemical text of the
Aurora consurgens and am now about half way through the first rough draft. It is now becoming obvious why von Franz did not want us to read this text in her mutilated edition of the
Aurora consurgens. It just did not suit or support the thesis she was presenting to us. Sadly, I myself was deceived by this and I neglected until very recently to undertake any deep research into the
Aurora consurgens because of the existence of her work. I now find it very annoying that an intelligent person thought they could deceive people by purposively hiding a key part (a half indeed) of an alchemical work in making their edition. It is not as if she did not have the leisure and funding to be able to visit Zurich and examine the actual manuscript. I have struggled most of my life without such funding and leisure. I could not go and examine the manuscript in Zurich, instead I foolishly relied on her book. It is rather amusing that a Jungian writer has recently written a work of interpretation, in full Jung mode, in which they explored aspects of the
Aurora consurgens - perhaps that should be "aspects of the part of the
Aurora that von Franz wanted us to see". I am sure this later writer was entirely misled by von Franz and knew nothing about the full text. Hopefully, later this year I will be able to publish the full text. My translation will have flaws and imperfections, but it will at least be an honest attempt to let the original writer of the
Aurora consurgens speak to us again after six hundred or more years, and not a deceptive attempt to mutilate and recontextualise his words.
1 September 2009
I am still harping on about von Franz and her misrepresentation of the
Aurora consurgens. It is not only myself that was misled by her work but today I read in Mircea Eliade's classic book
The Forge and the Crucible where on page 197 of the later English edition, he writes after referring to von Franz' book "Aurora consurgens is unique among alchemical treatises. Only about half-dozen of the "classics" of alchemy are quoted, and technical instruction and chemical recipes are lacking". The technical instruction and chemical recipes are lacking only in von Franz's redaction of the work! I have spent the last week or more translating these chemical recipes and processes. That Eliade, who was close to the Jungians knowing them personally and being invited to the Eranos conferences, was also misled, is rather sad.
10 September 2009
I have almost completed creating a corrected copy of another image from the
Aurora consurgens manuscript. It still requires a little more tweaking and cleaning up. One of the interesting aspects of this well known image is that it has been described as a battle between the Light Sun and the Black Sun. The Black Sun does appear in a very few alchemical works - the
Ripley Scroll, the Kelly 'Theatre of Terrestrial Astronomy' and in an image in Mylius'
Philosophia reformata - but is not mentioned in the
Aurora consurgens. Instead the black headed 'Sun' is an artefact, well known to anyone familiar with medieval manuscripts. Illuminated manuscripts often had gold and silver leaf applied to parts of images. This was laid onto a cushion of gum and then burnished to a high gloss. Now gold does not tarnish as it is chemically inert, but silver on the other hand is attacked by sulphur oxides or hydrogen sulphide in the air and develops a black patina. This blackening has been interpreted by some people, unaware of this aspect of silver leaf in manuscripts, as an intention of the artist and writer. Sadly, I have on a few occasions had to disillusion people about this 'Black Sun'. They are usually unhappy about this and in a few cases even thought me to be foolishly mistaken. The 'Black Sun' image is one that Jungians and other esotericists are strongly drawn to and thus invest their belief in. They are often not very amenable to having their 'Black Sun' taken away from them - but truth remains truth, however much one wishes to believe in a contrary viewpoint. This image instead is about the opposition of Sun and Moon as is seen in the section of text in the
Aurora consurgens which this image serves to illustrate.
15 September 2009
My amusement with the von Franz
Aurora consurgens continues to grow. In her book she wants us to accept that the text of the first part was written by Thomas Aquinas. Now there is no evidence at all for this, and I doubt if one could find a single Aquinas scholar who would accept the Aurora as being written by Aquinas. There are some alchemical writings that are established as being written by Aquinas, for example
De mixtione elementorum. Here we read a sentence, where he is speaking of compounds, such as:
"Some think that the substantial forms of the elements remain, while the active and passive qualities of the elements are somehow placed, by being altered, in an intermediary state; for if they did not remain, there would seem to be a kind of corruption of the elements, and not a combination."
A closely argued and analytical piece of scholasticism. Now von Franz, finding the
Aurora consurgens to be written in an entirely different style with a confused gathering together of ideas, suggested that this indicated that Thomas Aquinas was here going though some strange inner psychic struggle. This seems mere self-delusion on her part. She wants us to see the work as a record of Aquinas undergoing some psychic breakthrough, happily analysable by Jungian psychology. It is instead obvious that the work was not written by Aquinas, but then that would have spoiled her thesis. Sadly, her book has cast a long shadow over the
Aurora consurgens - but it will rise again!
28 January 2011
I have spent the last few days printing out and binding up copies of the latest book in my Magnum Opus series. This is the vitally important early work, the Aurora consurgens, which exists in a number of manuscripts, the earliest of which is in Zurich and dates to the early 15th century. Sadly, our modern view of this work has been distorted by the translation of part of the work by von Franz and its contextualisation within a Jungian psychological mindset. A few years ago it really annoyed me that the Aurora consurgens was incapable of being properly understood because people were trying to grasp it only through the Jungian publication. The work contains a series of 38 amazing illustrations but these were not included in the von Franz edition, no doubt because they did not fit into her Jungian thesis. Over the last decade or so people have been writing to me asking how the images fit into the text. I tried to explain that they only had access to part of the work through the von Franz, but it became obvious to me that in order to allow people to appreciate the Aurora consurgens I would have to produce an edition of the entire work complete with the illustrations. After attempting a translation myself, I eventually was able to put this into the much more capable hands of Paul Ferguson, and he has now produced the first ever English translation of the complete work. The ealiest manuscript, that in Zurich, has been damaged and is incomplete and does not contain the complete set of images. I decided instead to use the images from a later manuscript here in Glasgow.
So, I spend the last few days binding up an initial batch of copies and these are now available for sale. This will be seen as one of the treasures of the Magnum Opus series and it has given me the greatest pleasure to have been able to make this work available, so that people can read it as it was intended. I publish it with no commentary, no attempt to contextualise it within some set of modern ideas.
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