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Jung, Alchemy, and the Aurora Consurgens Jung, Aquinas, and the Aurora Consurgens: Establishing a Relationship with God By Barrie Davis A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Religious Studies School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Barrie Davis All rights reserved ii For Kim iii Abstract The reunion of a man with God is the subject of a medieval text which aggregates excerpts from the Bible and Arabic alchemical texts that had recently become available in Europe. The Aurora Consurgens personifies God as Wisdom, a spiritual being who not only formed the world in the beginning but is also a guide to men to return to God subsequent to their separation at the Fall. The union of feminine Wisdom and a man is aligned with pairs of opposites such as spirit and soul, and is also conflated with the union of a man and a woman. While the text is perhaps falsely ascribed to St. Thomas, it is consistent with his ideas so that it may be explicated using his writings on the Trinity, psychology, angels, and Greek philosophy. From there, correspondence is established with C. G. Jung‘s concept of archetypes, and the text is subsequently interpreted from the perspective of analytical psychology. It is identified how interaction of archetypes associated with the union of a man and a woman provide an explanation for the process of redemption given in the Aurora. A similar process of redemption is identified in other writings from the beginning of the Christian era up to the modern teachings of the Catholic Church. iv Contents Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 2. Background .................................................................................................................. 10 2.1. Sources of the Aurora and the Writings of Aquinas and Jung ................................. 11 2.2. Authorship and Date of the Aurora Consurgens ..................................................... 17 3. The Aurora Consurgens and St. Thomas Aquinas ........................................................ 21 3.1. Aquinas on Wisdom ............................................................................................... 24 3.2. Wisdom and the Aurora ......................................................................................... 37 3.3. Redemption and the Aurora ................................................................................... 41 3.4. Evaluation of the Explication of the Aurora ........................................................... 45 4. Analytical Psychology and the Aurora Consurgens ...................................................... 56 4.1. Jung on Wisdom .................................................................................................... 59 4.2. Types and Archetypes ............................................................................................ 68 4.3. Angels and Complexes ........................................................................................... 78 4.4. Wisdom and the Anima .......................................................................................... 87 4.5. The Spiritual Marriage ........................................................................................... 90 5. Summary and Conclusion .......................................................................................... 109 Appendix: Explication of the Aurora Consurgens .......................................................... 121 A.1. The Introductory Chapters ................................................................................... 122 A.2. The Parables ....................................................................................................... 128 A.3. Summary of the Explication of the Aurora .......................................................... 173 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 176 v Acknowledgements Thank you Dr. Arthur Buehler for acting as my supervisor on this project, and thank you also Dr. Anna Gade and Prof. Paul Morris for acting as my secondary supervisors. I am also grateful to Marie-Louise von Franz and the translators R. F. C. Hull and A. S. B. Glover for providing the scholarly edition of the Aurora Consurgens on which this thesis is based. vi 1. Introduction The Aurora Consurgens or Rising Dawn, Part I (hereafter the Aurora), is traditionally attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) and was written sometime from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. It largely comprises excerpts that are mostly from the Bible, but also from Arabic alchemical texts and Greek philosophy. The Aurora claims to identify what divine Wisdom is, and in parables indicates how Wisdom guides the reunion of God and a man. In modern times the Aurora was edited by Marie-Louise von Franz (1915 – 1998), who added a Commentary from the perspective of analytical psychology. There, von Franz assumes that Wisdom is the perception of a psychological factor, and the objectives of the present thesis are to (1) validate that assumption, and (2) use the concept of Wisdom as a psychological factor to identify the process of redemption given in the Aurora. Hence, this thesis identifies a way by which people may establish a relationship with God. Redemption in the Aurora means a process of removal of sin and reunion of a man with God subsequent to the Fall in the creation story of Genesis 1-3.1 There, God formed man in his own image; and from man he separated the woman Eve, the mother of all people. That is, the woman was previously an aspect of man, so man was initially comprised of male and female which means that man was androgynous.2 God cautioned the man that if they came to know good and evil they would die; but Eve acquired moral knowledge from the wise serpent which she shared with the man Adam. Consequently, they knew good and evil like gods, so they were no longer subject to the wisdom of God and were expelled from paradise. Just as Eve had been separated from the man, so also man was separated from God; but Eve and Adam as well as God and man yearned to be reunited. A broad hint of how a reunion may occur is given in Genesis 2:24 which says that when a man has a wife they ―shall be two in one flesh,‖ so when a man and woman marry they return to their former androgynous state. Hence, there are two related analogous relationships, God 1 Here, whereas the phrase ‗a man‘ or ‗the man‘ refers to the man of the Aurora and does not apply to women, the term ‗man‘ means ‗the human race‘ and is therefore gender inclusive. 2 See, for example, Midrash 8.1 in Freedman and Simon, Midrash Rabbah; Genesis, vol.1, 54. There R. Jeremiah b. Leazar explained that before the creation of Eve, man was androgynous, which ―means two bodies, male and female, joined together.‖ A similar concept is also given in Plato Symposium 189-191 (in Dialogues of Plato, 157-6). According to Meeks (―The Image of the Androgyne,‖ 185-6), the midrashic interpretation was influenced by the writings of Plato. See also Singer, Androgyny, 61-68, 92. 1 and a man, and a man and a woman, and the process of their interaction is referred to here as the spiritual marriage.3 In the Aurora God and a man are represented by various pairs of opposites, such as father and son, but predominantly as a female and her male lover. The relationship of this gendered pair is regarded not only as the union of a woman and a man, but also as an allegory of the reunion of the man with God. So, the female represents not only a woman, but also a feminine hypostatization of God called Wisdom. Hence, God appears to men as a female personification who promises to reunite her lover with the knowledge or wisdom of God. The complete process is not explicitly described but, following five introductory chapters regarding the nature of Wisdom, various perspectives of redemption are given in seven parables. The Aurora comprises revelatory excerpts, mostly from the Bible but also from Arabic alchemy, that are intuitively adapted and linked by comments from the author, and the meaning is not always obvious. It is shown that the theology of St Thomas Aquinas is consistent with that of the Aurora, so that the rational, methodical writings of Aquinas may be used to analyse the Aurora to reveal its meaning. This explication identifies that Wisdom is a personification of the essence of God who emanates to manifest in the human mind both as the knowledge or wisdom of God and as a feminine guide. Hence, the man in the Aurora is reunited with God by being guided by Wisdom to understand the wisdom of God. However, the Aurora does not identify how the union of a woman and a man is related to the reunion of God and a man. To consider this last issue, the process of redemption identified from the Aurora is then related to analytical psychology which was developed by the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung (1875-1961). According to Jung, the psyche comprises ego-consciousness and the unconscious, and the contents of the unconscious are inherited patterns of behaviour called archetypes. It is shown from the writings of Aquinas and Jung that in a man, the feminine anima is an archetypal factor which brings about the personification of Wisdom in the Aurora. The masculine characteristics of ego-consciousness in a man, which is what the man
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