Customer Reviews

The Wedding of Sophia: The Divine Feminine in Psychoidal Alchemy (Jung on the Hudson Book Series)

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Surprisingly few commentaries have been written about the Aurora Consurgens, a thirteenth-century manuscript attributed to Thomas Aquinas, since the original von Franz interpretations that accompanied the 1966 translation. Raff's important book goes a long way toward filling this depth-psychological gap by applying what he calls psychoidal alchemy, a perspective that moves our understanding of figures like Sophia beyond the realm of the exclusively psychic.

By doing this the author shifts the emphasis from the purely human to the transhuman. Describing the understanding of personality in terms of an earlier stage of the alchemical opus, he explains that "Sophia is not asking you to understand her in terms of your life, but to understand her in terms of hers"--a point that nudges the imagination out of egocentricity into something more like an ecology.

As clear as I found this informative book, in places it carried what felt like a missionary undertone, a sort of "if everyone could do this, we would change the world." Gentle (as in this case) or overt, such prescriptions go on and on while life on Earth gets worse, prompting irritable readers like me to want less advice and more show and tell. Happily, the author does a fine job overall of sticking close to his own experiences and to the images made available through his scholarship. This is clearly a book written by someone who cares very deeply about the subject.