Marie-Louise von Franz: Aurora Consurgens – Foreword
FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
Although this English edition of Aurora Consurgens appears almost ten years after the completion of the German text, the “secret” of alchemy, unlike certain other fields to which Jungian psychology can be applied, has never really lost its fascination for me.
The secret has to do with the relation of the unconscious psyche to inorganic matter and to the unitary reality which may be surmised as being their common substrate-that unus mundus which Jung describes in the last chapter of Mysterium Coniunctionis.
It seems to me that with every year the progress of the physical sciences is catching up with the bold results of Jung’s pioneer work, and that the time draws nearer when this psychophysical unitary reality will assume a form that may be apprehended by the intellect, even though it cannot be visualized concretely.
Here I will mention only two representative examples:
the relativists among modern physicists have come up against an “uncertainty relation” of time to events that have not yet entered the field of observation, while for their opponents in quantum physics the principle of causality has been put in question.
These difficulties suggest that serious consideration should be given to Jung’s proposed introduction of another principle into the explanation of nature, namely synchronicity.
In this controversy between the relativists and the quantum physicists over the determinism or indeterminism of events, the German physicist Aloys Wenzl has attempted the role of mediator by proposing that the four-dimensional mathematical continuum which constitutes the Einsteinian model of the universe be regarded as an only potentially existent model of reality, whereas the phenomena observed in quantum physics would represent the discontinuous actualizations of these mathematical
possibilities.
The Einsteinian model would thus become a conceptual parallel of Jung’s unus mundus) which in Jung’s view can be conceived in the form of mathematical structures.
Further, a French physicist, Olivier Costa de Beauregard, has made the proposal, based on the most recent developments in cybernetic studies, that the physical universe must possess a psychic “underside” as the sphere par excellence of “negentropy,” and that the unconscious should be conceived as possibly coextensive with the Minkowski-Einsteinian four-dimensional
world or “block universe.”
This would explain the timelessness of the unconscious and certain ESP phenomena.
Indeed, Costa de Beauregard goes a step further, arriving independently at a parallel conception of Jung’s hypothesis of an “absolute knowledge” (underlying synchronistic phenomena, for instance).
The psychic or infrapsychic underside of the universe would have, in Costa de Beauregard’s view, to be conceived as a “source of information” which embraces all possible knowledge, a kind of “supraconsciousness” of which the conscious phenomena in animals and men are little crystallizations.
The information it contains consists of images that correspond to external situations.
I mention this theory because it seems to me that the concept of a unus mundus and the hypothesis of an absolute knowledge are no longer so strange today as they were some years ago, seeing that certain branches of modern physics and of information theoryhavarrived~atrallel conceetions.
The~ time mayyot be too far off when physics and depth psychology will really be able to join hands, and only then will the full significance of
Jung’s rediscovery of alchemy be appreciated.
Perhaps, too, the hypothesis I have put forward, that the Aurora text may go back to St. Thomas Aquinas, will then appear less absurd than the reader might think at first sight.
Even though I was not able to convince my anonymous critic in the Bulletin Thomiste} he nevertheless admits that the idea is “seductive,” and Father
Victor White recently assured me in a letter that he “likes the idea, though there still seem to be a great many difficulties.”
The fact that the style and content of Aurora differ so widely from St. Thomas’s usual manner of writing seems to present, as before, the chief difficulty; but I think two things have to be considered which I would like to repeat here.
Firstly, the experience of a breakthrough of the unconscious must necessarily assume a form quite different from that of a text consciously composed by its author, and it will therefore not contain the same
clearly defined concepts.8 Jung himself once said to me jokingly:
“When the philologists dig me up again a thousand years hence, they will be a hundred percent certain that the essay on synchronicity and Answer to Job cannot have been written by the same author, let alone by the same author in the same year.”
Often philological criticism, when applied to a creative genius, is too rigid, and St. Thomas was undoubtedly a personality who burst asunder the framework of the conventional scholastic.
His sudden breaking off of the Summa) together with the reports of his mental disturbance or of some shattering inner experience, seem to me as before to indicate that the approach of death had brought the unconscious uncommonly close.
So I can still stand today by my proposition-and it is no more than that.
On the other hand, in this English edition of the book various errors, incomplete quotations, wrong references, etc. are corrected.
And here I would like to express my deepest thanks to Mr. A. S. B. Glover, whose verification of quotations and references when checking the bibliographical data has enabled many improvements to be made in this edition.
For his patience and support and for his scholarly translation of the Aurora text, I would like to express my lasting gratitude, as well as to Mr. R. F. C. Hull for his careful translation of Parts I, III, and IV.
For the present edition I have tried to orient myself with respect to the literature that has appeared in the interim, but working in Switzerland and not having the time to travel abroad I have encountered considerable difficulties in this respect.
Thanks to the helpfulness of the public library in Fribourg, I was able to find some of the books I needed, but the collection is limited and some works that I wanted to consult were not obtainable.
“That particularly surprised me in this connection, however, was the paucity of theological works that concern themselves with comparisons between modern theories of the unconscious and St. Thomas’s theory of the soul.°
I am convinced that a study, by one more qualified than I, of such concepts as the vov~1roiiJrii<-6~, SaptentiaD1:t-and the·rarionesaeTernaewould-bttng to light many stimulating points of agreement with Jung’s concept
of the self, the collective unconscious, and the archetypes.
The archetypes, because of their irrepresentable potentiality, seem to correspond by and large to the intellectus possibilis.
Jung’s idea of a potential unus mundus seems to me a modern scientific formulation of the archetypal image of Sapientia Dei, with, however, the incalculable difference that the unus mundus is a concept derived from pure empiricism, whereas that of Sapientia Dei is purely metaphysical.
Nevertheless, the gulf between the two might, in my opinion, actually have been bridged when, at the end of his life, St. Thomas experienced how the
Sapientia Dei, which till then had existed for him only as a metaphysical concept in his mind, suddenly revealed its overwhelming sychic reality.
At the time when Jung had finished the first draft of Mysterium Coniunctionisp in 1944, he had a serious accident followed by the grave illness he describes in his memoirs.
During this illness he experienced, on the threshold of death, the great visions of the coniunctio reported there.
When I saw him again after his illness, he said: “What I wrote in the Mysterium is true, I don’t need to alter the text. But I only know now how real these things are.”
Might it not be that St. Thomas Aquinas too, only experienced on his deathbed, when the Song of Songs flooded back into his memory, how real Wisdom and a union with her can be?
Kusnacht-Zurich, June I964 M.-L. v. F ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, Page ix-xiii
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