Aurora Consurgens takes an unusual form for an alchemical work. It is structured as a series of parables and reads as a commentary on scripture, drawing most heavily on the Song of Songs and on the wisdom literature, and it applies that biblical language to the alchemical Work throughout. The bride and bridegroom of the Song become the two principles that must be joined; the language of longing, searching and union is read operationally.
Several manuscripts are illuminated, and the images are among the strangest in the alchemical corpus, including hermaphrodite figures and combats between animals that are read as the conjunction of opposites.
The text became widely known in the twentieth century through the edition and commentary of Marie-Louise von Franz, prepared in connection with C. G. Jung's work on alchemy. Jung read the alchemical corpus as a projection of psychic processes onto matter, and Aurora Consurgens, with its explicitly erotic and religious vocabulary applied to a laboratory operation, was an unusually good witness for that reading.
That modern reception is now inseparable from the text. A reader coming to it today is generally coming through Jung, and it is worth knowing that.