The (Jungian) Books Keep Rolling In

These are all new except for Becoming- not sure how that one got in there!

• Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts - Daryl Sharp
• The Mystical Qabalah - Dion Fortune
• The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit - Donald Kalsched
• The Aion Lectures - Edwin F Edinger
• The Creation of Consciousness - Edwin F Edinger
• Pathways To Bliss - Joseph Campbell
• Aurora Consurgens - Marie-Louise Von Franz
• The Fear of the Feminine - Erich Neumann
• The Interpretation of Fairy Tales - Marie-Louise Von Franz
• The Religious Function of the Psyche - Lionel Corbett

I've also got the entire Bible now - including the 4th volume, which is an index.

The Qabala is the source for both the Tarot and Astrology apparently, or so I keep seeing. But there are all kinds of claims made about it by various groups - many of which seem weird and cultish. For me it's another source of symbolism to enrich the inner artistic world.

Aurora Consurgens, which means Rising Dawn, is a medieval text about Alchemy attributed fascinatingly to Thomas Aquinas, and supposedly written in a feverish state in his final days after suffering a blow on the head and experiencing some kind of profound enlightenment. Von Franz believed he was undergoing individuation and had realized that in fact that is the mysterious process the Alchemists were really engaged in. If she's right, they believed they were transforming base matter but were actually transforming their own personalities by coming into a more open and honest relation to the unconscious Self and projecting that process onto the matter that they were so busily mixing and melting. The physical transformation of metals became a stand-in for the inner psychological transformation. My God I love this stuff!! That said though, I don't recommend Aurora Consurgens - instead I recommend the green Alchemy book listed below, for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

I had already linked to The Religious Function of the Psyche by Lionel Corbett in my last post about books, but I've bought it since then, so I added in to the list here even though it isn't visible in the picture - somehow it ended up too far down in the stack and is hidden behind the already-been-reads.

These are the ones I've finished - and the one on the front of the bundle is new since last time:

• Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology - Marie-Louise Von Franz

Alchemy with the striking green cover is my favorite of the bunch so far. Von Franz wrote it after wading laboriously through Aurora Consurgens (in the top picture). That one was a hard slog through dense territory - written essentially to analyze the very difficult material. Only after doing that was she able to condense the symbolism and pen this much more readable and in fact amazing little book. Though I don't think I would have understood parts of it without having read a few of the other books on these stacks to get a grounding in the Jungian concepts.