A Flash of Golden Fire

The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of the Modern Soul in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

by Thomas Elsner

Available January 2025

A Flash of Golden Fire: The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of the Modern Soul in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Thomas Elsner is number twenty-two in the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology, published by Texas A&M press. Past authors in this series include Verena Kast, Anthony Stevens, Murray Stein, James Hollis, Claire Douglas, Luigi Zoja, Stanton Marlon, Joseph Cambray, and Ann Ulanov.

In the early twentieth century C. G. Jung survived an intense encounter with the unconscious. He did this by giving expression to his inner world in the paintings and dialogues found in The Red Book. Yet Jung felt alone in this work, unable to find a precedent or cultural parallel, until he discovered alchemy. This ancient “protoscience” became the bridge Jung had been seeking between the remote past and the present. Yet between the downfall of alchemy in the eighteenth century and Jung’s Red Book in the twentieth, it seems that there was a gap in the tradition.

Thomas Elsner, J.D., M.A. is a certified Jungian Analyst since 2005, a practicing psychotherapist for over twenty-five years, a training analyst in the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts as well as the C. G. Jung Study Center of Southern California, a past Core Faculty member of Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the current co-editor in chief of the journal Psychological Perspectives. Thomas has taught, lectured, and published articles on topics related to Jungian psychology, alchemy, Romantic literature, and folklore and fairytales in England at Oxford and Devon, in Switzerland, Ireland, as well as for Disney Studios in Hollywood and throughout the United States.