Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2014, 59, 8–30

Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens1

Aksel Haaning, Roskilde, Denmark

Abstract: The paper focuses on the year 1929 when Jung published ‘A European com-
mentary’ to Richard Wilhelm’s German translation of the Taoist text The Secret of the
Golden Flower. This shows that Jung had already started on the track of European
alchemy by following up Conrad Waldkirch’s preface in Artis Auriferae (1593); and it
raises the question of whether this could be the possible missing link to Jung’s subsequent
research in Alchemy and Hermetic Philosophy in the years to come. It is argued that here
was the beginning of Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens, the publication of which
concludes the Mysterium Conuinctionis more than twenty years later. It is
further maintained that this choice of the Aurora is a profound expression of Jung’s
ambition to revitalize the past from within the individual, and helps explain Jung’s deep
concern with the welfare and future of modern society.

Key words: alchemy, Aurora consurgens, Mysterium Conuinctionis, 1929

Introduction: past and present

It is a great pleasure for me to address the distinguished audience of Jung
specialists gathered here. Moreover, I would like to thank profoundly the
Jung Institute in Copenhagen as well as the International Association for
Analytical Psychology for giving me the opportunity to participate in the
conference [here] in Copenhagen and present my research on Jung and the
Aurora consurgens. As some of you may know, my focus is not on the therapeutic
aspect of Jung’s paradigm. In this presentation I intend to explore a more
historical, or cultural-historical approach associated with Jungian Studies. My
professional background is in linguistics. I am a specialist in Medieval Latin,
and I focus particularly on sources of what we call the science and philosophy
of the Middle Ages in European history. This does not necessarily mean that I
have no understanding of Jungian therapy or Jungian experience of life—
whatever that might be. However I am not a therapist: I specialize in the history
and philosophy of science, and it is in this capacity that I would like to present some

1
A slightly expanded version of a keynote presentation given at the IAAP XIXth Congress in
Copenhagen, August 2013. It will be part of a forthcoming book on Jung’s study of alchemy and
Hermetic philosophy.

0021-8774/2014/5901/8 © 2014, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12052
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 9

results and considerations from my professional field. It turns out that this
interest in the past—seeing and understanding humanity in relation to the
past—correlates with Jung’s own impulse to undertake comprehensive
historical studies of mythology and the philosophy of religion, including the
history of alchemy.
If I may anticipate the course of my talk a little, I would say that the Aurora
consurgens, the text that Jung searched for, found and considered worth
publishing, is a crucial element of this wider context.

Medieval concepts of divine-human relations

In the European Middle Ages philosophers formulated the relational concept
that the human being is a ‘nexus Dei et mundi’, a link between the visible
cosmos and the invisible creator. Another frequent expression in the philosophical
texts of the Middle Ages is ‘cognitio Dei experimentalis’, a knowledge of God, an
experienced realization of the so-called divine (Beierwaltes 1974, p. 77). It is this
experienced realization of being a bridge between the two areas of visible and
invisible reality which adds a dynamic aspect that also generates momentum
through time. This means that the human being as a link, a point of connection,
will also be a conduit between past and present. Both are living, dynamic internal
movements on the individual and collective levels. In other words history plays a
decisive, albeit as yet unclear, role in the shaping of the individual, as any therapist
knows. This is also the case with our communal history, which we all share,
locally as well as globally. Hence I hope that my historical work, the academic
research on the history of the European Middle Ages and its significance to a
number of Jung’s texts, could be of some interest and value to all of us in the
international community gathered here.

The presentation of the text

My presentation is in four sections, and each section consists of a number of

questions I am still working on. I would like to share with you some of these
questions and my attempts at answering them. The focus will be on the fascinat-
ing text from the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century
entitled Aurora consurgens. This text dates from the European Middle Ages and
is written in Medieval Latin, the current professional language of the time. It is
prior to the invention of the printing press, and hence the original versions of
the text only exist in handwritten versions. Today we know the text because
Jung, at some point during the 1930s, discovers its existence. He immediately,
as I will argue, understood its possible significance for our modern psyche
and culture. Moreover he decides that among numerous unknown and as yet
unprinted texts, it is the Aurora consurgens which merited printing. There is
10 Aksel Haaning

no doubt that it is this text in particular which meant something special to

Jung’s professional work, and that he was anxious to extract it from the dark
Middle Ages and bring it into the modern daylight, so to speak. In this way Jung
wanted to ensure that the past could contribute to the present, not just through
retrospective reference to some antiquated mode, but as a potential enhancer of
contemporary experience. The contents of the past need to be freshly
articulated, just like ancient music needs to be played in order to become real
in the present.
The Aurora text is the third and final volume of Jung’s last concluding
scientific work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, originally published between 1955
and 1957 (Fig. 1). The front and title pages of the original German editions state
that the work is issued in co-operation with Marie-Louise von Franz. However
in the original Collected Works it was unfortunately only published as an
unnumbered Companion Volume outside The Collected Works.
This is unfortunate because the Aurora was not intended to be a mere
supplement. Marie-Louise von Franz undertook the comprehensive textual
critique and contextualization which allowed the text to be placed within the
thought paradigms of its day and age. The actual publication of the Aurora
consurgens as an intact piece of literary archaeology in the context of the highly
original works published by Jung in the 1950s shows that it marks the
culmination of Jung’s many years of comprehensive research into hermetic
philosophy and the philosophy of nature that characterizes alchemy, his main
research focus since the early 1930s.
Marie-Louise von Franz had been, almost from the beginning of Jung’s
alchemical quest, an important associate. Without exaggeration you could say
that the publication of the Aurora consurgens, with the help and assistance of

Figure 1. The original volumes of Mysterium Coniunctionis I-III

Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 11

Marie-Louise von Franz, is the crowning glory of Jung’s work. From this
perspective it is difficult to understand why so few scholars, not only of Jungian
studies but also in the field of the history of philosophy and ideas, have taken an
interest in the text.

Structure of the talk

As mentioned earlier, I have four sections, four headings, and four questions.
The first ones are: How and when did Jung discover the existence of the text?
How did he find the actual handwritten document containing the text? These
are the first questions. Later we shall take a look at what the text Aurora
consurgens actually represents, and more especially at what Jung finds in the
text, or believes he finds in the text. On the basis of this knowledge we might
be able to answer the question of when and not least why he decides to publish
precisely this text. I believe that the latter two questions are particularly closely
connected. Their answers complement each other, as I will demonstrate in the
final section of my paper. So if we can begin by answering these in fact quite
simple questions we might actually begin to understand what the text means
as well as the significance of von Franz’s and Jung’s interpretations.

How and when did Jung discover the Aurora consurgens?

At the end of the 1920s Jung enters a critical phase in his professional work. He
has written two major books on ‘modern psychology’, as he calls it, Psychology
of the Unconscious in 1912 and then Psychological Types in 1921 which
became possibly Jung’s most read and applied book. His psychological studies
and theories required that he experience the Europe he described in the 1920s
and 1930s as ‘our greatest problem’, from external perspectives. Accordingly
his extended travels took him across the North American continent, Arabian
North Africa and Central East Africa; whilst he also developed a therapeutic
practice with an increasing number of students and patients, especially from
England and America. In his publications he attempts to find words and
concepts that can describe the central therapeutic experiences with which his
works are concerned. For instance ‘individuation’, since it first figured as a
supplement in the English title of Psychological Types (1923), becomes a
relatively stable term. From 1926 he tentatively refers to a ‘something’ (etwas)
as ‘the reconciling symbol’; ‘this “something” is strange to us, and yet so near,
wholly ourselves and yet unknowable’ (Jung 1953, para. 398). This concept
seems to be presented as a point of departure as well as a goal of development.
From the end of the 1920s Jung begins to call the unifying symbol—this
‘something … strange and yet so near’—the ‘Self’.
At this point in time something appears to happen which influences the
direction of Jung’s work, including his understanding of the central concepts
12 Aksel Haaning

of the Self and the individuation process. Many years later we are able to see
that the change that occurs—in fact almost on a specific date—divides Jung’s
authorship into a first and a second half. I refer of course to the meeting with
Richard Wilhelm and the Chinese text The Secret of the Golden Flower. The
first half comes to an end when Jung puts the work on Liber Novus, the so-
called Red Book, aside, leaving it incomplete on page 189, and apparently
abandoning all thoughts of publishing this ambitious and enigmatic work.
The last completed image is on page 163, and it depicts a castle stronghold with
a yellow centre, drawn or painted in 1928. If not definitively, then certainly in
terms of its scientific momentum, the second half of Jung’s work is completed
in 1957 with the third and last volume of Mysterium Coniunctionis, which
contains the publication of the text Aurora consurgens. The first half of his
oeuvre concludes around 1928–1929, and is immediately followed by new
research that opens up the beginning of what—as we know today—was to
conclude the second half 25 years later.

A package on Jung’s doorstep

Now let us pick up the thread in 1928. At this point a package with a
manuscript arrives on Jung’s doorstep, dispatched by the German sinologist
Richard Wilhelm who held chairs in sinology at universities in Germany.
Today there is even a ‘Richard Wilhelm Translation Centre’ at the
University of Bochum. The reason is that Wilhelm brought a specific
sensitivity to bear on this process of translation, i.e., an ability to practise
empathy and receptivity before embarking on the mechanics of the task.
At the time this method was unique and well ahead of its time, and today
it still serves as a model for modern translation practice. What was
Wilhelm’s take on modernity? He realized that our modern sensibility
allowed for a profound psychological understanding not only of the
contemporary individual psyche but also of ancient and foreign texts and
their possible significance. Wilhelm’s mode is characterized by an attitude
that presumes egalitarian dialogue is possible between cultures; an approach that
radically opposed traditional Christian missionary work. Prior to working for the
Allgemeine Protestantischer Missionsverein, Wilhelm had studied literature and
music, and he was at least as concerned about the state of European culture as he
was about Chinese culture. To Wilhelm the solution was not a traditional Christian
mission, but a modern dialogue between cultures, particularly one that would
encompass dialogue between contemporary knowledge and past knowledge. Can
translation render the past more accessible? This is a problem that all cultures need
to address and solve. That is why Wilhelm’s method of approach is modern.
Some years earlier Jung had met Richard Wilhelm in Count Hermann
Alexander Keyserling’s (1880–1946) Schule der Weisheit in Darmstadt, where
they had both lectured. At this point Jung became interested in Wilhelm’s
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 13

translation of the I Ching, the Book of Changes and the psychology implicit in
this work. At the time Quingdao was a German colony on the north eastern
Chinese Pacific coast: in the mid 1920s Wilhelm had come there into possession
of a rare text on the prolongation of life. This text was from the Daoist school
of thought and entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower. Wilhelm had been
allowed access to a rare copy of the text, which had been printed in Shanghai
in 1920. The permission was given by a Lau NaiSüan who, during the
Xinhai-revolution of 1911–13, had fled inland, bringing some Daoist books
with him. Wilhelm had some of this translated into German, and soon after
his old Chinese mentor, NaiSüan, died. It was this translation that eventually
arrived in a package at Jung’s home in Küsnacht in 1928. Subsequently Jung
accepted Wilhelm’s invitation to write a psychological commentary on it, and
this became known as ‘A European commentary’, a decisive key text in Jung’s
authorship, written during the winter of 1928–1929 and published alongside
the text of The Golden Flower in November 1929. Shortly after the publication
Wilhelm himself died from an infection contracted many years earlier.
However, the flower was now planted in European soil, right in the midst of
the Europe which Jung, as we recalled earlier, repeatedly referred to as ‘our
greatest problem’.
We have already noted that this commentary divides Jung’s work chronolog-
ically into a first and a second half. His first book was published in 1902 and his
last, the essay ‘Approaching the unconscious’, was completed in May 1961. In
the middle we find Richard Wilhelm’s translation and the ‘European
commentary’ which was published in the autumn of 1929, when Jung was in
the process of putting the work on Liber Novus aside. In the 1959 postscript,
handwritten separately, a fictive future reader is addressed:

I worked on this book for sixteen years. My acquaintance with alchemy in 1930 took
me away from it. The beginning of the end came in 1928, when Wilhelm sent me the
text of the Golden Flower, an alchemical treatise. The contents of this book found
their way into actuality and I could no longer continue working on it.
(Jung 2009, p. 190; Shamdasani 2012, p. 129)

We shall now take a look at this actuality.

Opening the closed book: Artis Auriferae

The publication of The Secret of the Golden Flower and Jung’s ‘European
commentary’ had kindled Jung’s interest in history and alchemy. Their
publication had inspired the hope of finding some sort of European golden
flower which might actually exist; and as the Aurora consurgens is also called
an aurea hora this might well make manifest in the less literal form of a ‘Golden
hour rising’ rather than as a golden flower per se.
14 Aksel Haaning

While in the process of writing his ‘European commentary’, Jung had asked an
antiquarian bookseller in Munich to forward any European books on alchemy
that he came across. The first Jung received was the collection Artis Auriferae,
volumina duo printed in 1593 (the title means: The Art of Bringing Forth Gold).
According to Jung it stayed on his desk more or less untouched for two years—
most likely 1929 to 1931 (Fig. 2). However, the moment Jung decides to abandon
Liber Novus or The Red Book, he opens the Artis Auriferae. It consists exclusively
of alchemical treatises from the Middle Ages including Arabian treatises trans-
lated into Latin, as well as purely Latin texts. During the Renaissance, where
the printing press had inspired a renewed interest in the past, it became popular
to publish such texts from the Middle Ages. The publisher and printer Conrad
Waldkirch was a staunch believer in the reformed Lutheran faith and he offered
brief comments on the individual texts he put to print. Soon Jung began to pay
attention to these short prefaces in italics. His attention was particularly drawn
to the passage on page 183 in the Artis Auriferae—almost the same page as his
last, 189, in the Liber Novus!—where Waldkirch writes that in the originally
hand-written treatise printed on the following pages there is another text with a
similar title—Aureahora (the Golden Hour)—which he will not print.

Figure 2. (See Shamdasani 2012, p. 169)

Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 15

As I mentioned earlier I am not a therapist. However one does not need to be

one to understand that material that is not allowed to be printed and published,
material that so to speak must remain in the dark Middle Ages where it
originated, must be interesting, even important and significant. Jung’s interest
does not diminish when Waldkirch, the printer, actually explains, or at least
hints darkly, that it is a specific issue that had made him decide not to
publish it. He states that the author seems to be a rather pious man, no doubt
a man of the church. However, he, the unknown author of the Latin text, makes
so bold as to compare the mystery of the alchemical stone to the mystery, death
and resurrection of our Lord Christ. Moreover, he states that the secret of
alchemy is hidden in the biblical writings, especially the Psalms and the Song
of Solomon (Fig. 3).
So, instead of Christ’s death and resurrection, are we to have the mystery of the
stone? What would that mean? Paganism disguised in the language of the Bible? A
symbolic rather than a literal understanding? At this point Jung’s interest in
alchemy must have been truly kindled. It is in this moment, so to speak, that
Conrad Waldkirch had, unwittingly, handed Jung the key to what fourteen years
later would become the central chapter in Psychology and Alchemy—that crucial
Chapter V, ‘The lapis-Christ parallel’(Jung 1952 [1944], paras. 447–515).

Figure 3. Jung’s copy of Artis Auriferae (p. 183)

16 Aksel Haaning

Here, in this chapter, in Jung’s interpretation, two eras are shown to

intertwine. A subject, which in the age of the Reformation had been considered
heretical and unacceptable to religious persuasions, has now become in
modernity an important part in the foundation of a new science of the soul.
Something has been transmitted from the past to the present. But it is not a gift
we can take for granted: it requires work to be done.

A detective in London
Having put Liber Novus aside and opened Artis Auriferae, Jung discovers that
there once existed a book on this enigmatic symbolic motif which likens the
lapis philosophorum to Christ, and that this book was not allowed to be
published. The consolation is that at least at one point it did exist. Where could
one find this manuscript? Where to begin? Well, like they say in fairy tales:
‘Look about you!’ Just a few miles away from his home in Küsnacht Jung
makes inquiries at the Zentralbibliothek in Zürich, where the librarians from
the manuscript department were able to inform him that there is indeed a rela-
tively unknown illustrated manuscript entitled Aurora consurgens, the so-called
Codex Rhenovacensis 172. This manuscript is most likely from the fifteenth
century and hails from a monastery in Rhinau. However, unfortunately the text
is incomplete; the entire first section is missing. Still, this information was a
good start. It shows that a tradition of committing the text to manuscript had
existed, and this inspires hope that an intact version with the full wording might
be found.
Jung must have had something of the detective in his make-up. According to
Barbara Hannah’s Biographical Memoir he apparently loved to relax with
detective stories, precisely because they were not real. However the Aurora clue
does anything but relax him. On the contrary he now becomes a kind of
Sherlock Holmes himself, and since he was started on the track by reading
the Artis Auriferae, his quest soon takes him to London—not to Baker
Street, but to the British Museum. So in 1935 we find Jung-as-sleuth in
London, in the Library of the British Museum. From the end of September
into the first days of October Jung gives the well-known ‘Tavistock
Lectures’, published in 1968 by E.A. Bennet. In the discussion session after
the second lecture Jung explains how, in the interpretation of individual
dreams, an understanding of their themes and motifs can be expanded
by finding complementary materials in the history of philosophy and
religion. This is Jung’s so-called amplification method, which he attempts
to explain to the—judging by the pitch of his delivery—somewhat
conservative British psychiatrists.
These lectures, the formal context of Jung’s visit to England, thus also
afforded an opportunity for Jung to develop the cultural critique that came to
characterize his work in the 1930s:
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 17

We Europeans are not the only people on earth. We are just a peninsula of Asia, and on
that continent there are old civilizations where people have trained their minds in
introspective psychology for thousands of years, whereas we began with our psychology
not even yesterday but only this morning. These peoples have an insight that is simply
fabulous, and I had to study the Eastern things to understand certain facts of the
unconscious. I had to go back to understand Oriental symbolism. … I had to study not only
Chinese and Hindu but Sanskrit literature and Medieval Latin manuscripts which are not
even known to specialists, so that one must go to the British Museum to find references …
(Jung 1977a, 1977b, para.139)

In the mind-games with which Jung engages the sceptical British, Jung’s allusion is a
stroke of genius: by locating his sources in the British Museum itself, in the heart of
British high culture, he questions whether they even know their own past. As a
psychiatrist Jung extends his role to revealing to the British aspects of their own
culture which they are unable to see for themselves! As a researcher in cultural
subjects he shows the spark of his genius by embodying humour in his serious discourse.
Once Jung realized that the philologists responsible for the manuscript
collections in Zürich, even though they had found indications that a complete
text existed, were unable to find other copies of the Aurora consurgens—most
likely because they were not part of their collections—he realized he would have
to do the research work himself. His allusions to medieval Latin manuscripts
which were unknown to even the specialists show that he had succeeded in
finding a rare print in the British Museum in which he found the first ‘references’
that provided him with clues as to how and where to continue his search.
What Jung had found is the only extant printing I am aware of from 1625. It
is still in the British Museum, and Jung never succeeded in acquiring the book
himself. It was published by Johannes Rhenanus and it has a very long Latin
title. Our Aurora sive Aurea hora is found in Vol. II. However, regarding the
possible reconstruction of the text there are significant problems with using this
particular printing. The reason is that the many variations on the wording of
the biblical texts have, in this version, been realigned with the Vulgata, the
official source of biblical quotations in the Latin version of the Bible.
These minor but significant variations in the manuscript’s many biblical
quotations influence the text’s character, and they qualify the specific cognitive
experience they are intended to illustrate. However, having found a printed
version, Jung could now identify the treaty’s so-called incipit, its first words,
universally used to catalogue texts prior to the advent of the printing press.
Having the incipit from the print—Venerunt mihi omnia bona—it now became
possible to begin to search for manuscripts in the catalogues!

1937: Jung at Yale University

The comment in the Tavistock Lectures in London 1935 is thus the first, albeit
somewhat indirect evidence, that Jung is on the trail and looking specifically for
Aurora manuscripts. Before a year has gone by he is in possession of a
18 Aksel Haaning

manuscript with the entire text, written in a clear and legible hand, from the
fifteenth century. It was located in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which
houses one of the world’s largest collections of medieval manuscripts.
The story of the Aurora consurgens—from noting Conrad Waldkirch’s
preface to the findings in the Bibliothèque Nationale—is told by Jung in the first
outline of his historical studies in alchemy, the Eranos lectures in August 1936.
In the original version from the Eranos-Jahrbuch 1936 Jung mentions the
Aurora on no less than ten occasions. Moreover he reveals that a complete
manuscript exists in Paris. However it was not found by Jung himself, it was
found by his wife, Emma Rauschenberg Jung. My guess is that Jung’s wife, in
the context of her work on the historical sources of the grail legends which
had taken her to the Bibliothèque Nationale, had also looked for the Aurora.
She has been able to do so because Jung, on the basis of the print in London,
could give her the incipit, the first words, by which the text is registered in the
old manuscript catalogues. Emma Jung’s historical studies of the grail legends
began around 1930, at the same time that Jung takes up alchemical studies.
However, the fact that the text is actually found by Emma Jung is not
mentioned by the diligent detective. As far as I am aware, the Eranos-Jarhbuch
of 1936 is the only place where this is mentioned. In Psychology and Alchemy,
which contains the Eranos presentation in a slightly expanded version, the focus
is on the contents, and Jung mentions only Waldkirch’s preface as contributing
to the momentum which inspired his detective work.
The following year Jung endeavours to give some application to these
contents for the first time. In the three 1937 Yale University lectures on psychol-
ogy and religion, later published under the same title, Jung quotes the recently
discovered text. It is in the context of the discussion of the ability of modern
consciousness to distinguish between what Jung calls dogmatic and natural
symbols: Jung addresses the significance of alchemy in relation to the symbols
of the nature philosophy of antiquity, and later to the Christian religion’s domi-
nant symbols. Jung now claims—for the first time in front of an entirely academic
public—to have made the astonishing discovery that alchemical philosophy, as
represented in hundreds of forgotten and often controversial texts and images,
is in fact a repository in which religious symbols from antiquity and early
Christianity have quite literally lived on and continued developing.
Whilst discussing alchemy Jung also references the Aurora consurgens in the
second lecture on ‘Dogmas and Natural Symbols’. Jung is by this point obviously
well acquainted with the text which he calls ‘a pseudo-Thomasian tract of the thir-
teenth century’, thereby expressly dating it to the century of Thomas Aquinas!
(Jung 1958 [1977], paras. 93–94). The specific context is that Jung gives examples
drawn from a number of sources amongst the philosophical canons of antiquity
and the middle ages, where the divinity is described as a holistic concept, either
a circle or a square. Moreover this imago Dei (image of god) occurs in alchemical
texts in Greek, Latin, and Arabic. Furthermore, the Aurora consurgens is an early,
perhaps the earliest, example of the lapis of alchemy (which in a number of specific
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 19

texts is described as circular or square, in heaven and on earth) being juxtaposed

with Christianity’s conception of God and Christ. Thereby the lapis becomes an
alternative to the Trinity or God presented as a purely spiritual entity located in
a heavenly sphere, and thus represents a personal experience of God as opposed
to a dogmatic view. The Aurora thus reveals a different conception of the divine,
as we shall see in a moment.
In the course of subsequent events we see how Jung mediates this new knowledge.
He does so partly by pointing out the existence of overlooked historical sources, as
he did during the Tavistock Lectures, and partly by summarizing and explaining
the contents of these historical sources. In the process he presents these records
of individual experiences of religious symbols as holding potential significance
for modern humanity. Only two years later he presents his new findings in a
lecture at Yale University, and the following year he publishes a compilation of
all his investigations and understandings in Psychology and Religion.
This is Jung at his best as a researcher in cultural history, almost functioning as
an archaeologist and detective in one, tracing and finding unknown sources from
the past which even medieval scholars did not know about. However, the
purpose, the intention, and the drive in this momentum derive from his profession
as a doctor concerned with diagnosing contemporary diseases and looking for
ways to heal and relieve the sufferings of modern man and modern society.

Two more manuscripts

In 1937 Jung actually visited Copenhagen in his professional capacity as chairman
of the ‘International Medical Congress for Psychotherapy’, which gathered on 2–4
October. Jung is still eagerly in search of manuscripts containing the complete
wording of the Aurea hora text, The Golden Hour, which is another name for the
Aurora consurgens. In fact he was closer to his goal than he knew. In the manuscript
collection in the Royal Library in Copenhagen there is a complete version of this
rare text in a hand-written version from the middle of the fifteenth century. There
was no way Jung could have known, and his engagement at the congress did not
allow him much time to go through the old catalogues! Had he had the time, and
had he looked for it, he would no doubt have found the hand-written manuscript
that I found in the mid-1980s (Fig. 4).
This text is almost the same age as the oldest known version which Jung and
von Franz had access to, and its version of the texts follows the others. As a
generalization you could say that the text has been handed down to us in a
relatively stable condition: so the finding is not as sensational as it may sound
at first. I wrote to Marie-Louise von Franz in the late 1980s, telling her about
the discovery, and she was excited. She asked me to send a photocopy, and
naturally I did. She seemed to have plans for a new edition, but in her later years
illness limited her ability to work, so this was never realized. With regard to the
question of the authorship, the Copenhagen discovery does not bring new
information. In terms of the text’s relationship to Thomas Aquinas and his
20 Aksel Haaning

Figure 4. Aurora – Gl. Kgl. Samling

possible role in the creation of the text, there is still a divide of two centuries.
The Copenhagen manuscript, as well as the oldest one which Jung and
von Franz had access to, originates in the fifteenth century. However, there
is some news to share. It so happens that I have identified yet another com-
plete version with the text intact in a manuscript dating from the fourteenth
century. It is thus at least 100, perhaps 150 years older than those which Jung
and von Franz had access to. It is located in Hannover in the Wilhelm Leibniz
Bibliotek in Germany. It could be from the first half of the fourteenth century,
and in that case only 50–70 years separate it from the time of Thomas
Aquinas (Fig. 5).
At this point it is fair to say that even if we did find a manuscript which
proved to be yet older, and even if it named Thomas Aquinas as the author, this
would not in itself prove anything. We shall never be able to prove whether the
famous European philosopher and Church Father, Thomas Aquinas, is the
author of Aurora consurgens. However, this does not mean that we cannot
say anything significant about the possibility or for that matter investigate the
question further. We might return to this issue later.
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 21

Figure 5. Hannover, Niedersächsischen Landesbibliotek IV 339 f. 62

What is the Aurora consurgens?

Now, we should not forget the most important thing: what kind of a text are we
dealing with? And we still have two questions left: when and why did this
particular text intrigue Jung and prompt him to publish it? When and why?
We shall now attempt to answer these questions.
The actual wording of the title: Aurora consurgens originates in the so-called
Vulgate, more specifically the Song of Solomon, chapter 6, verse 9. The Song of
Solomon is a wonderful hymn about spiritual, as well as physical, love and
longing, and it also celebrates the unification of body and soul. It is a text that
explores love both as a symbol and a tangible reality; carnal longing as integral
to the soul’s longing, and spirituality as a part of the physical and erotic life; in
other words the coniunctio as realized love, you might say. As a biblical text it
has been subject to numerous allegorical interpretations, in Jewish as well as in
Christian and probably also Muslim traditions, and this is still the case even to
this day. In the MiddleAges it was a favoured text, and many of the well-known
medieval theologians have published commentaries on it, including Thomas
Aquinas, by the way.
22 Aksel Haaning

However, our title is ambivalent, it has a double aspect. The reason is that
Aurora, the goddess of dawn, dates from the mythology and philosophy of
antiquity, the pre-Christian pagan phantasmagoria. Aurora is the goddess of
dawn who wakes in and emerges from the darkness before the sun shows its
face. Dawn represents both separation and unification of night and day, light
and darkness. As such, this conception of the Aurora plays a part in the text
entitled Aurora consurgens because the first person narrator describes
unification with the deity on celestial and terrestrial levels, as well as on divine
and human levels. The treaty ends with a description of this coniunctio in the early
dawn—lifted from and inserted among obvious quotes from the Song of Solomon.
The state described is neither one of total light nor of total darkness: it embodies
both. This also means that, as an historical text, the Aurora consurgens is a blend
of two different traditions: on the one hand the Gnostic paradigm of antiquity, the
pagan spirituality, and on the other the Christian paradigm. The Aurora
consurgens shows how these two opposed traditions blend, or can at least be
experienced as connected. The author seeks to express this cognitive experience
without being constrained by his contemporary canonical dogmatic credos, and
regardless of any objections others might have. In a sense the text expresses a
reality of the soul and its numinous experience, and the author wishes to share
his insights with his contemporaries. Via the Arabian texts on natural sciences
and alchemy, the author is evidently acquainted with the pre-Christian modes of
thought found in antiquity. The Arabian texts were disseminated during the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, and the manuscript shows how this new knowledge had
influenced Christian psychology and generated a sensitive Christian mentality
which facilitates the experience of new mind-expanding paradigms. In the Yale
auditorium in 1937 Jung diagnosed the lack of such empathic sensitivity as a
deplorable shortcoming in modern humanity, and this critique of modernity is
stated expressly as being prominent amongst his reasons for publishing the
Aurora consurgens.
A significant feature of the text is that the euphoric celebration of eros in the
final pages is initiated by an encounter with the unexpected in the very beginning
of the text. Naturally Jung’s curiosity is aroused by the information that an
apparently suppressed text exists, as stated in Waldkirch’s preface. However, only
when he is in possession of the complete text is Jung able to form an impression of
what is actually at stake: so it was not until 1936, when Emma Jung returned from
the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, presumably bringing a copy of a manuscript
with the full wording, that Jung realizes what Waldkirch had been shy of printing.
The very first line must have intrigued Jung. The author is obviously a man of the
church. He knows the Vulgate (the Latin Bible) and the breviary by heart, uses
their vocabulary, but is also enthusiastic about the new texts about the
philosophers’ stone and what is referred to as ‘the Great Work’, translated from
the Arabic. To him the Arabian sages such as Senior and Morienus are just as alive
and present as the familiar figures of Paul and John or the disciples of the New
Testament. However the author is evidently intent on expressing a new discovery,
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 23

namely his realization that there is a correspondence between the non-Christian

Arabian alchemy and philosophy of science, and the Christian teachings in the
biblical texts; between the wondrous stone—‘the stone that does not deceive’—
and Christ, the cornerstone which the builders rejected. The author’s tone of voice
is at this point also intimate and he seems to be very anxious to convey to us an
experience, something that has happened to him.
In Psychology and Alchemy, first published in 1944, Jung spends six to eight pages
discussing central themes from this text, and it is to the introduction that the major
part of his commentaries and suggested parallels are devoted (Jung 1952, paras.
464–79). The text begins with an introductory presentation of the biblical wisdom,
the creative thought of God, from which the world or the cosmos originated: it is this
that continuously creates the cosmos and unites it, while also constituting the inherent
meaning of all things. The concept of the ‘wise thought’ or divine wisdom is known in
the philosophy of antiquity, but here in the Aurora text the focus is on a real life
meeting, because the ‘something’ encountered is experienced on a personal level. That
makes a fundamental difference. What began as an abstract concept or an established
mythological allegory becomes a personal real life experience of a touching attentive
presence which affects and thereby changes the narrator, the author of the text. It is
this experience of a meeting that is the text’s most important message; it gives rise
to a new understanding that the author feels passionately about.

Wisdom in the earth

On the first page a sustained dialogue opens with the divine female figure of
Sapientia, who speaks on behalf of the biblical paternal God. She appears as
a personification of the wisdom of the biblical text, and through his own text
the author attempts to give her a voice. Occasionally the author’s and Sapientia’s
voices blend in the attempt to articulate the new knowledge. He claims to discover
a subliminal unity behind the various culturally determined texts he considers; this
experience changes him profoundly on a personal level. However the author’s
ambition is to transcend his own individual understanding and to express this
new insight in a way that makes it comprehensible to others. Thus he develops
the language of his time—the imagery used in biblical texts and the philosophy
of nature—by subtly altering it through metonymical cross-referencing.
For this reason explicit parallels are made between the Arabian alchemy, the
philosophy of nature, and the Christian approach throughout the manuscript,
and it is expressed in a personal voice through the use of direct and indirect quotes
from his contemporary original literature. This is evidently a dialogue with his soul.
Nobody would have been surprised if the author had called this book about his new
profoundly individual realization Liber Novus instead of Aurora consurgens!
So what is distinctive about this specific text? It soon becomes obvious that the
biblical female protagonist speaks as a living being not just from the heavenly
spheres or from the throne of God on high, but from the depths of the soul. In
the first parable this figure of wisdom says: ‘Who is the man that liveth, knowing
24 Aksel Haaning

and understanding, delivering my soul from the hand of hell? They that explain
me shall have eternal life, and to him I will give to eat of the tree of life which is
in paradise, and to sit with me on the throne of my kingdom’ (von Franz 1966,
p. 59). And in the last parable, before the final conjunction with the human being,
the woman says in hindsight: ‘There was darkness over the earth, because I stick
fast in the mire of the deep and my reality is not disclosed, out of the depths have I
cried … I called and there was none to answer me’ (ibid., pp. 134–35). She is the
queen of heaven and the voice of the deep—a divine being who needs a devoted
relation to humanity’s knowledge and insight.
Simultaneously recognizable though radically different, and perhaps even
influenced by Arabian texts, this archetypal voice of wisdom addresses humanity
from the depths of the earth. Her purpose is that the mutual realization, their
consensus expressed in the sentence ‘how wonderful it is for two people to live as
one’, should liberate both of them with the momentum of the shared,
transformative eros that is otherwise extremely rare in the philosophy of the Middle
Ages and seems so absent in the theology conceived in the name of the Trinity, with
its Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is gnosis and insight almost larger than life and
expressed in the language of the Bible and the Song of Solomon! Jung must have felt
that he had found the hidden treasure. His intention to publish the text most likely
stemmed from this actual moment of reading the text for the first time.

When is the concrete decision made?

When was the actual commitment to publish? The decision must have been made
in the autumn or the winter of 1942, at the latest. In the first German edition of
Psychology and Alchemy published in 1944, the preface is dated January 1943.
On page 510 a note indicates that the text, prepared by ‘M-L. von Franz, will be
soon published in toto in Vol. 6 of Psychological Dissertations’. However 13 years
were to go by before it was finally published, and then as the third and last volume
of Jung’s major conclusive work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, made in collaboration
with Marie-Louise von Franz. This course of events makes it evident that the
decision to publish the Aurora consurgens must have been made before January
1943. Naturally we cannot identify the earliest point in time when it was taken.
As we noted Jung mentions the existence of the text in the Eranos Jahrbuch in
August 1936, in Psychology and Religion from 1938, and briefly in Paracelsica
from 1941. In none of these publications does he indicate that it will be published
or that there are even plans for a complete publication of the entire text.
It is my guess that Jung most likely made up his mind to publish the
manuscript during the early years of WWII—that is between 1939 and 1942.
These were the darkest years, perhaps the darkest hour of the twentieth century;
after Dunkerque, after the fall of France, perhaps the autumn of 1942, still long
before D-Day. This would have been just prior or concurrent with the battle of
Stalingrad, the first defeat of Nazism, and the first realistic hope of Allied
victory in the future, a light in the darkness.
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 25

Jung constantly responds to contemporary issues and participates in

dialogues about them. His life and work span the events of the last decade of
the nineteenth century, the imperial age before WWI, the turbulent war itself,
the revolutions, the Weimar Republic, the fascism of the interwar years, the rise
of Nazi power, WWII and the Cold war of the 1950s. Had he lived a few
months longer, he would have heard President Kennedy in 1961! In other
words, Jung lives through the first half of the twentieth century with all its
horrors, wars, and catastrophes—and the Holocaust which leads to the
founding of the UN and universal Human Rights, modern democracy and
pluralism. Each in their context, Jung’s books and publications are in a direct
and express relationship with these developments in Europe and North
America, including their ramifications for analysis and their impact on the so-
called third world, particularly the Pacific Islands, Africa, China, India, and
the predicament of all aboriginal peoples. As a young psychiatrist Jung had
wanted to diagnose and treat the individual patients at the Burghölzli in a
way that might allow that patient to return to life. However Jung’s ambition
was to reach beyond the individual patient and into the societal structures
where the disease originates in order to expand the efficacy of his diagnosis.
This is the momentum behind Jung’s strong social consciousness, his roles as
both doctor and cultural critic. This is the context in which we should
understand the Liber Novus, or at least Book One of The Red Book, which
was also an attempt at diagnosing contemporary socio-cultural developments.
The publication of Aurora had a similar intent. And maybe beyond that it
aspired to achieve some kind of medicina mentis, an invitation to heal our splits.

Why Aurora?

Now, we have looked back at that crucial passage in Jung’s professional work
about 1928–29, in which he received the Secret of the Golden Flower and began
to see alchemy and hermetic philosophy in a new light. We have followed this
evolution forward. Now it is time to look back from that particular moment—and
conclude this paper.
We have seen how Jung apparently makes a definitive decision not to go
ahead with a possible publication of the Liber Novus, The Red Book. Jung
closes The Red Book around 1930, but at the same time he opens the Artis
Auriferae, that collection of strange texts that have been waiting on his work
desk. Here he discovers Conrad Waldkirch’s preface, with its ambivalent
reference to the possible existence of the Aurora consurgens. From this point
onwards he tries to track the Aurora down and, as we now know, five years
later he finds it in a roundabout way. Within it he encounters a text about
wisdom personified, speaking and even shouting from the depths of the earth.
He must have been amazed at how closely this echoed the book that he had just
closed, his own Liber Novus, characterized as that was by analogous central
experiences and imaginary conversations that were initiated prior to WWI.
26 Aksel Haaning

Jung began to make a fair copy of Liber Novus in 1915 at the height of the
insanity of the war. If we return to the beginning of The Red Book, we might
find some informative perspectives that can help us answer the question why—
why he ended up choosing the Aurora consurgens to close his body of work?
His ambition to diagnose contemporary society was evidently inspired by a
work he considered epochal, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
(1885). In the wake of the Enlightenment and in the heyday of scientific positivism,
Nietzsche proclaimed the existence of an overlooked depth perspective on the
world and human existence: Die Welt ist tief, ‘The World Is Deep’ as it says in the
midnight roundelay in R. J. Hollingdale’s translation: ‘Now I awake at dreaming’s
end: / The world is deep, / And deeper than the day can comprehend. / Deep is its
woe’. This suggests that the reach of the unconscious extends far beyond what
diurnal consciousness can comprehend and encompass, that the unconscious in
accordance with its own conceptual logic transcends consciousness, as Jung points
out. Already in Jung’s first publications there are clear, strong references to
Nietzsche’s work. From November 1914 Jung reads Zarathustra closely, and the
following year he begins to make a fair copy of Liber Novus. After the quotes
from Esajas and Paul drawn from the Latin Bible, the first main motif of the
book—which constitutes the opening of the central text in the first chapter—is
the reader’s introduction to a certain ‘we’. Surely this ‘we’ must be the self-
conscious European human being forged in the years leading up to 1914, who
now lives in a time that is influenced by two ‘voices’. To put it another way, one
voice is that of the times or the dominant contemporary voice, the consciousness
that knows and enjoys listening to itself. However, at the same time there is a
presentiment of another voice that tries to make itself heard. The first is die Stimme
der Zeit, and the other is die Stimme der Tiefe, the voice of the deep. The
recognition of these two different voices and their mutual relationship or lack of
relationship—actually their explicit lack of consensus—is as mentioned the
opening motif of this strange book.
For in this experimental ‘New Book’—Liber Novus—Jung attempts by way
of introduction to listen to the voice of the deep and allow it to speak. Evidently
this entails adopting a certain prophetic mode in these opening passages, but the
intention is not to lay claim to being a new prophet or the mouthpiece of a god.
As its modern editor Sonu Shamdasani reminds us: ‘[Nietzsche] proclaimed
the death of God, Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the soul’
(Shamdasani 2012, p. 77). Later in the book Jung takes an intimate look at
the depths and allows himself to be drawn into the deep, perhaps also
inspired by the precedent of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In these depths there are
no ecstatic primal screams or hitherto unwitnessed hallucinations. What he
finds here instead is a vital evocation of biblical and classical material:
characters and protagonists who, so to speak, walk out of their representations
in the archaeological findings depicted in the pages of learned books. ‘In these
depths, we do not find pure experiences as such, no “primal scream”, but biblical
and classical figures’—as Shamdasani points out (ibid., p. 100). Manifestations
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 27

of named as well as implied or as yet unidentified characters come to life, find a

voice, express independent thoughts and engage in experimental and
unpredictable dialogues. The unconscious is not explored as a philosophical
or a theological abstraction, but, in a manner of speaking, as a re-memorizing
and experiencing of the forgotten or overlooked lived history. It is a conscious
and indeed quite deliberate attempt at articulating those depths whose
dimensions till then only Nietzsche had explored.

Back to the Middle Ages—within ourselves

It is from this perspective that we should attempt to understand something of what
Jung endeavours to capture experimentally in this medieval-styled book. As he him-
self states in it: ‘I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages—within myself.
We have only finished the Middle Ages—of others’ (Jung 2009, p. 330;
Shamdasani 2012, p. 130).
Here is an ‘I’—and a ‘we’. The Red Book is, by the way, also a literary work
and Jung—in the guise of the first person narrator—attempts quite consciously
to extract and articulate something that has been lost in the Middle Ages. He is
driven by a yearning to recapture the forgotten potential for insight so closely
associated with medieval times. Most likely his impulse was based on the
presumption that the Middle Ages were characterized by a philosophy and a
psychology in which the soul was perceived as a substance, something real with
an objective existence, as opposed to the contemporary perspective wherein the
voice of the times had developed a psychology without soul. Modern humanity
may have removed itself from the Middle Ages in time, but it has not matured by
doing so. Hence from 1915 Jung writes and illuminates the Liber Novus as if it
were a medieval manuscript, a genuine codex. He imitates their abbreviations
and, out of concern for the reader, he provides an overview of the abbreviation
system prior to the text. He even decapitalizes the nouns, as was the practice in
medieval German prior to the mid-sixteenth century. All this is an attempt to reach
back to a certain knowledge or science of the soul that once informed a period of
European culture and psychology, of European humanity, now sadly forgotten or
neglected. That is the challenge of his experiment: through writing in the original
idiom to re-experience the lost aspects of our culture. Just like contemporary
marine archaeologists, researching Viking ships from the early Middle Ages, have
undertaken with their own hands their rebuilding down to the minutest detail.
Such practical immersion in the manual craftsmanship brings insight into and
experience of the methods and approaches of the past which deskwork and
computer animations are unable to replicate. In the same way and for the same
reason Jung wants to write a medieval book with his own hands, to craft it
physically in order to extract and approach the mentality of the past, to seek
and find the forgotten knowledge of the soul, the ignored voice of the deep and
allow the voice of the unconscious, of nature, to speak again in a liber novus.
28 Aksel Haaning

The ‘New Book’ is also an old medieval book with a new content that recovers
what has been lost and locates it in a contemporary context: this is as true of
Jung’s ambition for The Red Book as it was for the author of Aurora consurgens.
Thus both attempt to give voice to the past in the present. This actually brings
The Red Book more into connection with the medieval mind, especially the fabu-
lous and more imaginative 12th century of Hildegard of Bingen, Bernardus
Silvestris and Ioachim of Fiore, than the more scholastic 13th century (Chenu
1966, pp. 108–220; Dronke 1985; Crocco 1986; de Lubac 1959–1962).

Conclusion
Jung closed Liber Novus, because, as he writes in 1959, his discovery of
alchemy had brought him a means of actualizing what the ‘New Book’ had
reached towards: that is, its content had found a way into scientific work. This
actualization is manifest and realized in the discovery of the alchemical and
hermetic traditions in European history and the significance Jung attributes to
them. We have traced how this process was inspired and epitomized by the
discovery, in reality, of a forgotten medieval book. Jung seemingly rejected the
notion of publishing The Red Book or of even regarding it as a work of art.
But instead of publishing, even privately as an artist, the book that we might
understand as completing the task of the Middle Ages, Jung instead seizes the
opportunity as a scientist to publish a discovery from the Middle Ages that he
felt it was imperative we return to in order to foster the development of our
modern culture. So it was both an individual and a collective aspiration. Jung
wanted to express and amplify his personal experience in the scientific language
of his time, and that impulse drove his many, deep and challenging
investigations into alchemy. A similar ambition is the driving force of the author
of the Aurora, whoever he is. He not only wished to express a deep personal
(and possibly heretical) experience, but also desired to mediate it to his
contemporaries in the language of his day and age. This language is characterized
by reference to biblical quotes and the new scientific literatures that had recently been
translated from the Arabic, and was received with enthusiasm by most.
Jung had discovered a light in the darkness surrounding these issues, and he
resolved to allow it to shine, deciding it should be published at the very darkest
moment of the century. In so doing we may not be able to claim that Jung (and
von Franz) facilitated intercultural dialogues across the globe as effectively as
the ‘golden flower’ that initiated it all: but they did make available a ‘golden
hour’, an opportunity for all cultures to engage in the dialogue between the
knowledge of the past and the knowledge of the present. We are constantly in
danger of losing the spirit of the depths, that voice from nature, from the
unconscious. In my view that is still a major challenge to humanity in the
twenty-first century. Jung’s studies in alchemy, and Jung’s and von Franz’
publication of the Aurora consurgens, are in that respect a help and an
inspiration to us all, which as yet has not received the recognition it deserves.
Jung’s quest for the Aurora consurgens 29

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article est centré sur l’année 1929, pendant laquelle Jung a publié « Un commentaire
Européen » sur la traduction en allemand du texte taoïste Le Secret de la Fleur d’Or par
Richard Wilhelm. Ceci met en évidence que Jung, qui avait pris en compte la préface de
Artis Auriferae (1593) par Conrad Waldkirch, était déjà sur la voie de la tradition
alchimique européenne; et cela pose la question de savoir comment cela pouvait être
possible sans avoir eu l’apport des recherches ultérieures de Jung en alchimie et en
philosophie hermétique pendant les années suivantes. L’auteur fait en effet l’hypothèse
que cela a marqué le début de la quête de Jung vers l’Aurora Consurgens, l’œuvre qui
a conclu Mysterium Conjunctionis plus de vingt ans après. Il est ensuite soutenu que
ce choix de l’Aurora est l’expression profonde du désir de Jung de réactiver le passé à
l’intérieur du sujet, et aide à comprendre la profonde implication de Jung dans le bien-
être et l’avenir de la société moderne.

Dieser Beitrag fokussiert das Jahr 1929, in dem Jung sein ‘Ein europäischer Kommentar’
zu Richard Wilhelms deutscher Übersetzung des taoistischen Textes Das Geheimnis der
goldenen Blüte veröffentlichte. Dies zeigt, daß sich Jung, in Kenntnis von Richard
Waldkirchs Vorwort zu Artis Auriferae (1593), bereits auf der Spur der europäischen
alchemistischen Tradition befand und es stellt sich die Frage, ob dies möglicherweise
das missing link zu Jungs anschließenden Forschungen der nächsten Jahre über Alchemie
und hermeneutische Philosophie sein könnte. In der Tat wird argumentiert, daß dies der
Beginn von Jungs Forschen nach der Aurora consurgens gewesen sei, die Schrift, auf die
sich Mysterium Coniunctionis mehr als zwanzig Jahre später bezieht. Es wird weiterhin
die These unterstützt, daß die Wahl der Aurora ein tiefer Ausdruck von Jungs Streben
nach Wiederbelebung der Vergangenheit von innerhalb des Individuums ist, was auch
dazu verhilft, Jungs tiefes Besorgtsein um das Wohlergehen und die Zukunft der
modernen Gesellschaft zu verdeutlichen.

Questo scritto si concentra sul 1929, anno in cui Jung pubblicò il suo ‘Un commento
all’Europa’ sulla traduzione in tedesco a opera di Richard Wilhelm del testo Taoista Il
segreto del Fiore D’oro. Ciò mostra che Jung, avendo notato la prefazione di Konrad
Waldkirch all’ Artis Auriferae (1593) era già sulle tracce delle tradizioni alchemiche
europee; e ciò sollevò la questione se questo potesse essere l’anello mancante alla
successiva ricerca junghiana sull’alchimia e sulla filosofia ermetica negli anni successivi.
Certamente si sostiene che questo fu l’inizio della ricerca perAurora consurgens, la cui
pubblicazione conclude il Mysterium Conunctionis più di venti anni dopo.Si sostiene
inoltre che questa scelta dell’Aurora sia una profonda espressione dell’aspirazione di
Jung a rivitalizzare il passato dall’interno dell’individuo, e ci aiuta a chiarire il profondo
interesse di Jung nei confronti della prosperità e del futuro della società moderna.

В центре внимания этой статьи—1929 год, когда Юнг опубликовал свой «европейский
комментарий» к переводу на немецкий язык даосского текста «Тайна Золотого
Цветка», сделанному Рихардом Вильгельмом.Это показывает, что Юнг, заметив
30 Aksel Haaning

предисловаие Конрада Вальдкирха к ArtisAuriferae (1593), уже шел по стезе

европейской алхимической традиции; и это поднимает вопрос о том, является ли это
возможным недостающим звеном в цепи последующих исследований Юнга в области
алхимии и герметической философии. И вправду, в статье доказывается, что для Юнга
это было началом поисков «Auroraconsurgens»—трактата, публикацией которого
двадцатью годами спустя завершился его труд MysteriumConiunctionis. Автор
придерживается мнения о том, что выбор «Aurora» является глубоким выражением
надежды Юнга оживить прошлое внутри каждого человека, и помогает разъяснить
глубокую озабоченность Юнга благополучием и будущим положением современного
общества.

Este documento se centra en el año 1929 en el que Jung publicó Un Comentario Europeo
de la traducción al alemán del texto Taoísta de Richard Willhem El Secreto de la Flor de
Oro. EAllí se demuestraque Jung, al haber citado el prefacio de Conrad Waldkirch en
Artis Auriferae (1593), estabaya en la vía de la tradiciónal química, y se planteaba la
cuestión de sieste podría ser el eslabón perdido de investigaciones posteriores de Jung
en alquimia y filosofía hermética en los años venideros. De hecho, se afirma que este
fue el inicio de la búsqueda de Jung de la Aurora consurgens, la publicación en la
cualconcluirá Mysterium Coniunctionis d veinte años más tarde. Además, se sostuvo
que la elección de la Aurora es una expresión profunda de la aspitación de Jung para
revitalizar el pasado dentro del individuo, y ayuda a esclarecer la profunda preocupación
de Jung por el bienestar y el futuro de la sociedad moderna.

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