Carl Jung on “Gnostic” “Gnosticism” “Gnosis” – Anthology
The people who call me a Gnostic cannot understand that I am a psychologist, describing modes of psychic behaviour precisely like a biologist studying the instinctual activities of insects. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1647
Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. “Gnosticism.” ~Carl Jung, Footnote #13, CW 11, Page 45.
The new Gnostic churches are all new inventions of old things, like soup warmed up again, they have no direct relation. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 240
King’s Gnostics and Their Remains and Mead’s Fragments of a Faith Forgotten are two books dealing with the old Gnostics. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 240
The last trace pf the Gnostic. teaching. probably died out with the Cathar and the Albigenses. They were the Manichaeans; Gnostics called Bougres in France. “Bougre” derives from the word for Bulgarian and came into southern France. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 240
He [the hero] shares this paradoxical nature with the snake. According to Philo the snake is the most spiritual of all creatures; it is of a fiery nature, and its swiftness is terrible. It has a long life and sloughs off old age with its skin. In actual fact the snake is a cold-blooded creature, unconscious and unrelated. It is both toxic and prophylactic, equally a symbol of the good and bad daemon (the Agathodaimon), of Christ and the devil.
Among the Gnostics it was regarded as an emblem of the brain-stem and spinal cord, as is consistent with its predominantly reflex psyche. It is an excellent symbol for the unconscious, perfectly expressing the latter’s sudden and unexpected manifestations, its painful and dangerous intervention in our affairs, and its frightening effects ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 580
We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man’s affinity with the gods. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Page 242.
Gnostic philosophy established three types, corresponding perhaps to three [out of four] of the basic psychological functions: thinking, feeling, and sensation [intuition missing]: The pneumatikoi could be correlated with thinking, The psychikoi with feeling, The hylikoi with sensation. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 14
The inferior rating of the psychikoi was in accord with the spirit of Gnosticism, which, unlike Christianity, insisted on the value of knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 14
Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, Tertullian saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. He invoked against it the testimony of his own inner world, his own inner realities, which were one with his faith. In shaping and developing these realities he became the creator of those abstract conceptions which still underlie the Catholic system of today ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 18
Type differences should also be borne in mind when we consider the long and perilous struggle which the Church from its earliest beginnings waged against Gnosticism. Owing to the predominantly practical trend of early Christianity the intellectual hardly came into his own, except when he followed his fighting instincts by indulging in polemical apologetics. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 15
Through castration Origen freed himself from the sensuality that was coupled with Gnosticism; he could then surrender without fear to the treasures of Gnostic thought, whereas Tertullian through his sacrifice of the intellect turned away from Gnosis but also reached a depth of religious feeling that we miss in Origen ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 26
Because of this spirit the Gnostics took their visions as absolutely real, or at least as relating directly to reality, and for Tertullian the reality of his feeling was objectively valid ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 29
The Gnostics projected their subjective inner perception of the change of attitude into a cosmogonic system and believed in the reality of its psychological figures ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 29
Gnosticism shows man’s unconscious psychology in full flower, almost perverse in its luxuriance; it contained the very thing that most strongly resisted the regula fidei [rule of faith] ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 409
In complete contrast to Tertullian, Origen did not cut himself off from the influence of Gnosticism; on the contrary, he even channelled it, in attenuated form, into the bosom of the Church, or such at least was his aim. Indeed, judging by his thought and fundamental views, he was himself almost a Christian Gnostic ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 22
The central religious idea in this legend, of which there are numerous variants, is the holy vessel, which, it must be obvious to everyone, is a thoroughly non-Christian image, whose origin is to be sought in extra-canonical sources. From the material I have cited, it seems to me a genuine relic of Gnosticism, which either survived the extermination of heresies because of a secret tradition, or owed its revival to an unconscious reaction against the domination of official Christianity ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 401
Official Christianity, therefore, absorbed certain Gnostic elements that manifested themselves in the worship of woman and found a place for them in an intensified worship of Mary. I have selected the Litany of Loreto as an example of this process of assimilation from a wealth of equally interesting material. The assimilation of these elements to the Christian symbol nipped in the bud the psychic culture of the man; for his soul, previously reflected in the image of the chosen mistress, lost its individual form of expression through this absorption ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 399
Vessel symbolism probably contains a pagan relic which proved adaptable to Christianity, and this is all the more likely as the worship of Mary was itself a vestige of paganism which secured for the Christian Church the heritage of the Magna Mater, Isis, and other mother goddesses. The image of the vas Sapientiae, vessel of wisdom, likewise recalls its Gnostic prototype, Sophia ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 398
It elucidates the psychological relations between the worship of woman and the legend of the Grail, which was so essentially characteristic of the early Middle Ages. The central religious idea in this legend, of which there are numerous variants, is the holy vessel, a thoroughly non-Christian image, a genuine relic of Gnosticism ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 401
The idea of angels, archangels, “principalities and powers” in St. Paul, the archons of the Gnostics, the heavenly hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, all come from the perception of the relative autonomy of the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 104.
These images are so intense that it is quite understandable why millions of cultivated persons should be taken in by theosophy and anthroposophy. This happens simply because such modern gnostic systems meet the need for expressing and formulating the wordless occurrences going on within ourselves better than any of the existing forms of Christianity, not excepting Catholicism ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 118
The primordial images [archetypes] are as much feelings as thoughts; indeed, they lead their own independent life rather in the manner of part-souls, as can easily be seen in those philosophical or Gnostic systems which rely on perception of the unconscious as the source of knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 104
As we have seen, Gnosticism, too, endeavored in all seriousness to subordinate the physiological to the metaphysical ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 297
Further, according to an early Christian-Gnostic idea, the spirit which appeared in the form of a dove was interpreted as Sophia-Sapientia Wisdom and the Mother of Christ. Thanks to this motif of the dual birth, children today, instead of having good and evil fairies who magically “adopt” them at birth with blessings or curses, are given sponsorsa “godfather” and a “godmother.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 93
Further, according to an early Christian-Gnostic idea, the spirit which appeared in the form of a dove was interpreted as Sophia-Sapientia Wisdom and the Mother of Christ. Thanks to this motif of the dual birth, children today, instead of having good and evil fairies who magically “adopt” them at birth with blessings or curses, are given sponsors a “godfather” and a “godmother” ~Carl Jung, CW 9.i Para 93
This elementary fact was correctly appreciated in the so-called Clementine Homilies, a collection of Gnostic-Christian writings dating from about A.D. 150. The unknown author understands good and evil as the right and left hand of God and views the whole of creation in terms of syzygies, or pairs of opposites ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 99
If we bear in mind the significance of the fish, it is easy to understand why a powerful attraction should emanate from this arcane centre, which might aptly be compared with the magnetism of the North Pole. As we shall see in a later chapter, the Gnostics said the same thing about the magnetic effect of their central figure (point, monad, son, etc.) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 239
Alchemy owes its real beginnings to the Gnostic systems, which Hippolytus rightly regarded as philosophic, and which, with the help of Greek philosophy and the mythologies of the Near and Middle East, together with Christian dogmatics and Jewish cabalism, made extremely interesting attempts, from the modern point of view, to synthetize a unitary vision of the world in which the physical and the mystical aspects played equal parts ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 267
We meet these images and ideas in Gnosticism, to which we must now give our attention; for Gnosticism was, in the main, a product of cultural assimilation and is therefore of the greatest interest in elucidating and defining the contents constellated by prophecies about the Redeemer, or by his appearance in history, or by the synchronicity of the archetype ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 287
The name Prunicus means both carrying a burden' andlewd.’ The latter connotation is more probable, because this Gnostic sect believed that, through the sexual act, they could recharge Barbelo with the pneuma that was lost in the world ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 307
My investigation seeks, with the help of Christian, Gnostic, and alchemical symbols of the Self, to throw light on the change of psychic situation within the “Christian aeon” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para ix.
From various hints dropped by Hippolytus, it is clear beyond a doubt that many of the Gnostics were nothing other than psychologists. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 347
Thus he [Hippolytus] reports them [Gnostics] as saying that “the soul is very hard to find and to comprehend,” x and that knowledge of the whole man is just as difficult. “For knowledge of man is the beginning of wholeness, but knowledge of God is perfect wholeness.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 347
In men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos. The Other, the fourth, corresponds in the Gnostic quaternities to the fiery god, “the fourth by number,” to the dual wife of Moses (Zipporah and the Ethiopian woman), to the dual Euphrates (river and Logos), to the fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 29
Irenaeus (Adversus haereses, II,5,1) records the Gnostic teaching that when Christ, as the demiurgic Logos, created his mother’s being, he “cast her out of the Pleroma—that is, he cut her off from knowledge.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 41, fn 23
The fact that not only the Gnostic Logos but Christ himself was drawn into the orbit of sexual symbolism is corroborated by the fragment from the Interrogationes maiores Mariae, quoted by Epiphanius. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 314
The Other, the fourth, corresponds in the Gnostic quaternities to the fiery god, “the fourth by number,” to the dual wife of Moses (Zipporah and the Ethiopian woman), to the dual Euphrates (river and Logos), to the fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 397
Gnosticism affords some very instructive examples of this. Neologisms tend not only to hypostatize themselves to an amazing degree, but actually to replace the reality they were originally intended to express ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 442
Our cancer case shows clearly how impotent man’s reason and intellect are against the most palpable nonsense. I always advise my patients to take such obvious but invincible nonsense as the manifestation of a power and a meaning they have not yet understood ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 26
This was the time when the Greeks started criticizing the world, the time of “gnosis” in its widest sense, which ultimately gave birth to Christianity. The archetype of the redeemer-god and Original Man is age-old we simply do not know how old.
The Son, the revealed god, who voluntarily or involuntarily offers himself for sacrifice as a man, in order to create the world or redeem it from evil, can be traced back to the Purusha of Indian philosophy, and is also found in the Persian conception of the Original Man, Gayomart. Gayomart, son of the god of light, falls victim to the darkness, from which he must be set free in order to redeem the world. He is the prototype of the Gnostic redeemer-figures and of the teachings concerning Christ, redeemer of mankind ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 202
It was, apparently, a Spanish bishop, Hosius of Cordoba, who proposed to the emperor the crucial word homoousia. It did not occur then for the first time, for it can be found in Tertullian, as the “unitas substantiae.” The concept of homoousia can also be found in Gnostic usage, as for instance in Irenaeus’ references to the Valentinians (140circa 200), where the Aeons are said to be of one substance with their creator, Bythos. The Nicene Creed concentrates on the father-son relationship, while the Holy Ghost receives scant mention ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 216
This psychological fact spoils the abstract perfection of the triadic formula and makes it a logically incomprehensible construction, since, in some mysterious and unexpected way, an important mental process peculiar to man has been imported into it. If the Holy Ghost is, at one and the same time, the breath of life and a loving spirit and the Third Person in whom the whole trinitarian process culminates, then he is essentially a product of reflection, a hypostatized noumenon tacked on to the natural family-picture of father and son.
It is significant that early Christian Gnosticism tried to get round this difficulty by interpreting the Holy Ghost as the Mother. But that would merely have kept him within the archaic family-picture, within the tritheism and polytheism of the patriarchal world. It is, after all, perfectly natural that the father should have a family and that the son should embody the father. This train of thought is quite consistent with the father-world ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 236
The Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as the Mother contains a core of truth in that Mary was the instrument of God’s birth and so became involved in the trinitarian drama as a human being. The Mother of God can, therefore, be regarded as a symbol of mankind’s essential participation in the Trinity. The psychological justification for this assumption lies in the fact that thinking, which originally had its source in the self-revelations of the unconscious, was felt to be the manifestation of a power external to consciousness.
The primitive does not think; the thoughts come to him. We ourselves still feel certain particularly enlightening ideas as “influences,” “in-spirations,” etc. Where judgments and flashes of insight are transmitted by unconscious activity, they are often attributed to an archetypal feminine figure, the anima or mother-beloved. It then seems as if the inspiration came from the mother or from the beloved, the “femme inspiratrice” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 240
In view of this, the Holy Ghost would have a tendency to exchange his neuter designation for a feminine one. (It may be noted that the Hebrew word for spirit ruach is predominantly feminine.) Holy Ghost and Logos merge in the Gnostic idea of Sophia, and again in the Sapientia of the medieval natural philosophers, who said of her: “In gremio matris sedet sapientia patris” (the wisdom of the father lies in the lap of the mother).
These psychological relationships do something to explain why the Holy Ghost was interpreted as the mother, but they add nothing to our understanding of the Holy Ghost as such, because it is impossible to see how the mother could come third when her natural place would be second ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 240
The devil is the aping shadow of God, thein Gnosticism and also in Greek alchemy. He is “Lord of this world,” in whose shadow man was born, fatally tainted with the original sin brought about by the devil. Christ, according to the Gnostic view, cast off the shadow he was born with and remained without sin ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 263
He was clearly a non-Christian Gnostic, and in particular so one gathers from the famous passage about the krateran adherent of the Poimandres sect, and therefore a follower of Hermes. Although alchemical literature abounds in parables, I would hesitate to class these dream-visions among them. Anyone acquainted with the language of the alchemists will recognize that their parables are mere allegories of ideas that were common knowledge. In the allegorical figures and actions, one can usually see at once what substances and what procedures are being referred to under a deliberately theatrical disguise. There is nothing of this kind in the Zosimos visions ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 344
And where would God’s wholeness be if he could not be the “wholly other”? Accordingly it is with some psychological justification, so it seems to me, that when the Gnostic Nous fell into the power of Physis he assumed the dark chthonic form of the serpent, and the Manichaean “Original Man” in the same situation actually took on the qualities of the Evil One. In Tibetan Buddhism all gods without exception have a peaceful and a wrathful aspect, for they reign over all the realms of being.
The dichotomy of God into divinity and humanity and his return to himself in the sacrificial act hold out the comforting doctrine that in man’s own darkness there is hidden a light that shall once again return to its source, and that this light actually wanted to descend into the darkness in order to deliver the Enchained One who languishes there, and lead him to light everlasting. All this belongs to the stock of pre-Christian ideas, being none other than the doctrine of the “Man of Light,” the Anthropos or Original Man, which the sayings of Christ the gospels assume to be common knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 380
If mankind is the guilty party, logic surely demands that mankind should be punished. But if God takes the punishment on himself, he exculpates mankind, and we must then conjecture that it is not mankind that is guilty, but God (which would logically explain why he took the guilt on himself). For reasons that can readily be understood, a satisfactory answer is not to be expected from orthodox Christianity. But such an answer may be found in the Old Testament, in Gnosticism, and in late Catholic speculation.
From the Old Testament we know that though Yahweh was a guardian of the law he was not just, and that he suffered from fits of rage which he had every occasion to regret ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 408
Christianity had at one time to fight for its life against Gnosticism, which corresponded to another psychological condition. Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning. But if the historical roots of our symbols extend beyond the Middle Ages they are certainly to be found in Gnosticism
. It would not seem to me illogical if a psychological condition, previously suppressed, should reassert itself when the main ideas of the suppressive condition begin to lose their influence. In spite of the suppression of the Gnostic heresy, it continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages under the disguise of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 160
It is a well-known fact that alchemy consisted of two parts which complement one another on the one hand chemical research proper and on the other the “theoria” or “philosophia.” As is clear from the writings of Pseudo-Democritus in the first century the two aspects already belonged together at the beginning of our era. The same holds true of the Leiden papyri and the writings of Zosimos in the third century. The religious or philosophical views of ancient alchemy were clearly Gnostic. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 160
We find the miraculous water mentioned in the first treatises of Greek alchemy, which belong to the first century. Moreover the descent of the spirit into Physis is a Gnostic legend that greatly influenced Mani. And it was possibly through Manichean influences that it became one of the main ideas of Latin alchemy. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 161
It [the cross] is, in fact, one of the prime symbols of order, as I have shown elsewhere. In the domain of psychological processes it functions as an organizing center, and in states of psychic disorder caused by an invasion of unconscious contents it appears as a mandala divided into four. No doubt this was a frequent phenomenon in early Christian times, and not only in Gnostic circles.
Gnostic introspection could hardly fail, therefore, to perceive the numinosity of this archetype and be duly impressed by it. For the Gnostics the cross had exactly the same function that the atman or Self has always had for the East. This realization is one of the central experiences of Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 433
As the center symbolizes the idea of totality and finality, it is quite appropriate that the text should suddenly start speaking of the dichotomy of the universe, polarized into right and left, brightness and darkness, heaven and the “nether root,” the omnium genetrix. This is a clear reminder that everything is contained in the center and that, as a result, the Lord (i.e., the cross) unites and composes all things and is therefore “nirdvandva,” free from the opposites, in conformity with Eastern ideas and also with the psychology of this archetypal symbol.
The Gnostic Christ-figure and the cross are counterparts of the typical mandalas spontaneously produced by the unconscious. They are natural symbols and they differ fundamentally from the dogmatic figure of Christ, in whom all trace of darkness is expressly lacking. Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 435
In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge, who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to be found in the cosmogonic jester of primitive peoples.) With the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an uneasy calm ensued, but the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the foreground. I would only mention Jakob Böhme, who sketched a picture of evil which leaves the privatio boni pale by comparison. The same can be said of Milton. He inhabits the same mental climate.
As for Böhme, although he was not a direct descendant of alchemical philosophy, whose importance is still grossly underrated today, he certainly took over a number of its leading ideas, among them the specific recognition of Satan, who was exalted to a cosmic figure of first rank in Milton, even emancipating himself from his subordinate role as the left hand of God (the role assigned to him by Clement). Milton goes even further than Böhme and apostrophizes the devil as the true principium individuationis, a concept which had been anticipated by the alchemists some time before. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 470
Looked at theologically, my concept of the anima, for instance, is pure Gnosticism; hence I am often classed among the Gnostics. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 460.
It is certainly remarkable that my critics, with few exceptions, ignore the fact that, as a doctor and scientist, I proceed from facts which everyone is at liberty to verify. Instead, they criticize me as if I were a philosopher, or a Gnostic with pretensions to supernatural knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 461.
Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 97.
Inasmuch as the devil was an angel created by God and “fell like lightning from heaven,” he too is a divine “procession” that became Lord of this world. It is significant that the Gnostics thought of him sometimes as the imperfect demiurge and sometimes as the Saturnine archon, Ialdabaoth. Pictorial representations of this archon correspond in every detail with those of a diabolical demon. He symbolized the power of darkness from which Christ came to rescue humanity. The archons issued from the womb of the unfathomable abyss, i.e., from the same source that produced the Gnostic Christ ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 255
This process of becoming human is represented in dreams and inner images as the putting together of many scattered units, and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification of something that was always there. The speculations of alchemy, and also of some Gnostics, revolve around this process. It is likewise expressed in Christian Dogma, and more particularly in the transformation mystery of the Mass. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 399.
Even at this early date (and not only in John) Christ is completely overlaid, or rather smothered, by metaphysical conceptions: he is the ruler over all daemonic forces, the cosmic saviour, the mediating God-man. The whole pre-Christian and Gnostic theology of the Near East (some of whose roots go still further back) wraps itself about him and turns him before our eyes into a dogmatic figure who has no more need of historicity.
At a very early stage, therefore, the real Christ vanished behind the emotions and projections that swarmed about him from far and near; immediately and almost without trace he was absorbed into the surrounding religious systems and moulded into their archetypal exponent. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 228
It is easy to see why such qualities made Mercurius an eminently suitable symbol for the mysterious transforming substance of alchemy; for this [symbol] is round and square, i.e., a totality consisting of four parts (four elements). Consequently the Gnostic quadripartite original man (fig. 064) as well as Christ Pantokrator is an imago lapidis ~Carl Jung, CW 12 Para 173
The original Gnostic myth has undergone a strange transformation: Nous and Physis are indistinguishably one in the prima materia and have become a natura abscondita. ~Carl Jung, CW 12 Para 447
I hope the reader will not be outraged if my exposition sounds like a Gnostic myth. We are moving here in those psychological regions where, as a matter of fact, the Gnosis is rooted. The message of the Christian symbol is Gnosis, and the compensation effected by the unconscious is Gnosis in an even higher degree. Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes deal with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative speech. ~Carl Jung, CW 12 Para 28
The original Gnostic myth has undergone a strange transformation: Nous and Physis are indistinguishably one in the prima materia and have become a natura abscondita ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 447
The doctrine that all evil thoughts come from the heart and that the human soul is a sink of iniquity must lie deep in the marrow of their bones. Were it so, then God had made a sorry job of creation, and it were high time for us to go over to Marcion the Gnostic and depose the incompetent demiurge. Ethically, of course, it is infinitely more convenient to leave God the sole responsibility for such a Home for Idiot Children, where no one is capable of putting a spoon into his own mouth.
But it is worth man’s while to take pains with himself, and he has something in his own soul that can grow. It is rewarding to watch patiently the silent happenings in the soul, and the most and the best happens when it is not regulated from outside and from above. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 126
Via Daniel and Enoch, the quaternity of God’s sons penetrated very early into Christian ideology. There are the three synoptic gospels and the one gospel of St. John, to which were assigned as emblems the symbols of the cherubim. The four gospels are as it were the pillars of Christ’s throne, and in the Middle Ages the tetramorph became the riding animal of the Church. But it was Gnostic speculation in particular that appropriated the quaternity.
This theme is so far-reaching that it cannot be dealt with more closely here. I would only draw attention to the synonymity of Christ, Logos, and Hermes, and the derivation of Jesus from the so-called “second tetrad” among the Valentinians. “Thus our Lord in his fourfoldness preserves the form of the tetraktys and is composed of”: ~Carl Jung, CW 13 Para 366
As I have pointed out, the union of opposites on a higher level of consciousness is not a rational thing, nor is it a matter of will; it is a process of psychic development that expresses itself in symbols. Historically, this process has always been represented in symbols, and today the development of personality is still depicted in symbolic form. I discovered this fact in the following way.
The spontaneous fantasy products I discussed earlier become more profound and gradually concentrate into abstract structures that apparently represent “principles” in the sense of Gnostic archai. When the fantasies take the form chiefly of thoughts, intuitive formulations of dimly felt laws or principles emerge, which at first tend to be dramatized or personified. (We shall come back to these again later). If the fantasies are drawn, symbols appear that are chiefly of the mandala type. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 31
From ancient times the lion was associated with Saturn. Khunrath calls him “the lion of the Catholic tribe,” paraphrasing the “lion of the tribe of Judah”—an allegory of Christ. He calls Saturn “the lion green and red.” In Gnosticism Saturn is the highest archon, the lion headed Ialdabaoth, meaning “child of chaos.” But in alchemy the child of chaos is Mercurius. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 275
I have drawn attention earlier to the passage in Hippolytus where the Gnostic interpretation of Psalm 24:7-10 is discussed. The rhetorical question of the psalm, “Who is this king of glory?” is answered in Hippolytus thus: “A worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people. He is the king of glory, mighty in battle.” This passage, says Hippolytus, refers to Adam and his “ascension and rebirth, that he may be born spiritual, not fleshly.” The worm therefore signifies the second Adam, Christ. Epiphanius also mentions the worm as an allegory of Christ, though without substantiating it further ~Carl Jung, CW 14 Para 484
The eye, like the sun, is a symbol as well as an allegory of consciousness. In alchemy the scintillulae are put together to form the gold (Sol), in the Gnostic systems the atoms of light are reintegrated. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 47
Hence we get the parallel of the dragon’s head with Christ, corresponding to the Gnostic view that the son of the highest divinity took on the form of the serpent in paradise in order to teach our first parents the faculty of discrimination, so that they should see that the work of the demiurge was imperfect. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 141
The personal unconscious is the shadow and the inferior function, in Gnostic terms the sinfulness and impurity that must be washed away by baptism. The collective unconscious expresses itself in the mythological teachings, characteristic of most mystery religions, which reveal the secret knowledge concerning the origin of all things and the way to salvation. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 257
The opus is a “transitus,” a in the Gnostic sense, a “transcension” and transformation whose subject and object is the elusive Mercurius. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 287
Irenaeus, reporting the views of the Gnostics, says: “The spiritual, they say, [is] sent forth to this end, that, being united here below with the psychic, it may take form, and be instructed simultaneously by intercourse with it. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 327
The union of the spiritual, masculine principle with the feminine, psychic principle is far from being just a fantasy of the Gnostics: it has found an echo in the Assumption of the Virgin, in the union of Tifereth and Malchuth, and in Goethe’s “the Eternal Feminine leads us upward and on.” ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 327
Anyone familiar with the spirit of alchemy and the views of the Gnostics in Hippolytus will be struck again and again by their inner affinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 328
The inner spiritual man of the Gnostics is the Anthropos, the man created in the image of the Nous, the (true man). He corresponds to the chin-yen (true man) of Chinese alchemy. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 490
And just as the Queen “flows with all delicious unguent” so, in the Acts of Thomas, a sweet smell pours from the heavenly goddess. She is not only the mother but the “Kore, daughter of the light.” She is the Gnostic Sophia, who corresponds to the alchemical mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 490
In this connection it should not be forgotten that in antiquity certain influences, evidently deriving from the Gnostic doctrine of the hermaphroditic Primordial Man, penetrated into Christianity and there gave rise to the view that Adam had been created an androgyne. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 526
In Gnosticism the original man Adamas, who is nothing but a paraphrase of Adam, was equated with the ithyphallic Hermes and with Korybas, the pederastic seducer of Dionysus, as well as with the ithyphallic Cabiri. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 589
Zosimos is the connecting link between alchemy and Gnosticism, where we find similar ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 627
I have pointed out that outwardly Mercurius corresponds to quicksilver but inwardly he is a “deus terrenus” and an Anima Mundi—in other words, that part of God which, when he “imagined” the world, was as it were left behind in his Creation or, like the Sophia of the Gnostics, got lost in Physis. Mercurius has the character which Dorn ascribes to the soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 699
The “sweet odour” of the Holy Ghost occurs not only in Gnosticism but also in ecclesiastical language, and of course in alchemy—though here there are more frequent references to the characteristic stench of the underworld, the odor sepulchrorum. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 701
Accordingly the arcane substance would appear to be the “inner” man or Primordial Man, known as Adam Kadmon in the Cabala. In the poem of Valentinus, this inner man is swamped by the goddess of love—an unmistakable psychologem for a definite and typical psychic state, which is also symbolized very aptly by the Gnostic love-affair between Nous and Physis. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 548
The earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 28, note 194.
Anthropos: Original or primordial man, an archetypal image of wholeness in alchemy, religion and Gnostic philosophy. There is in the unconscious an already existing wholeness, the “homo totus” of the Western and the Chên-yên (true man) of Chinese alchemy, the round primordial being who represents the greater man within, the Anthropos, who is akin to God. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 152.
It is apparent from this explanation that the desperately evasive and universal Mercurius that Proteus twinkling in a myriad shapes and colours is none other than the “unus mundus,” the original, non-differentiated unity of the world or of Being; the[agnosia] of the Gnostics, the primordial unconsciousness ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 660
Even if the peregrination up to this point was not an allegory of the opus alchymicum, from now on it certainly is. The opus is a “transitus,” in the Gnostic sense, a “transcension” and transformation whose subject and object is the elusive Mercurius. I will not discuss the nature of the transitus here in any great detail, as this would be the proper concern of an account of the opus itself. One aspect of the transitus, however, is the ascent and descent through the planetary spheres, and to this we must devote a few words ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 288
As the “Tabula smaragdina” shows, the purpose of the ascent and descent is to unite the powers of Above and Below. A feature worthy of special notice is that in the opus there is an ascent followed by a descent, whereas the probable Gnostic-Christian prototype depicts first the descent and then the ascent ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 288
I have drawn attention earlier to the passage in Hippolytus where the Gnostic interpretation of Psalm 24 : 7-10 is discussed. The rhetorical question of the psalm, “Who is this king of glory?” is answered in Hippolytus thus: “A worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people. He is the king of glory, mighty in battle.” This passage, says Hippolytus, refers to Adam and his “ascension and rebirth, that he may be born spiritual, not fleshly.” The worm therefore signifies the second Adam, Christ. Epiphanius also mentions the worm as an allegory of Christ, though without substantiating it further ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 484
Even if the peregrination up to this point was not an allegory of the opus alchymicum, from now on it certainly is. The opus is a “transitus,” in the Gnostic sense, a “transcension” and transformation whose subject and object is the elusive Mercurius. I will not discuss the nature of the transitus here in any great detail, as this would be the proper concern of an account of the opus itself. One aspect of the transitus, however, is the ascent and descent through the planetary spheres, and to this we must devote a few words ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 288
As the “Tabula smaragdina” shows, the purpose of the ascent and descent is to unite the powers of Above and Below. A feature worthy of special notice is that in the opus there is an ascent followed by a descent, whereas the probable Gnostic-Christian prototype depicts first the descent and then the ascent ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 288
Khunrath rises to Gnostic heights when he exclaims: “And our Catholick Mercury, by virtue of his universal fiery spark of the light of nature, is beyond doubt Proteus, the sea god of the ancient pagan sages, who hath the key to the sea and power over all things: son of Oceanos and Tethys.” ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 50
In Faust’s metamorphosis, Gretchen, Helen, Mary, and the abstract “Eternal Feminine” correspond to the four female figures of the Gnostic underworld, Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia. And just as Faust is embroiled in murderous happenings and reappears in changed form, so Picasso changes shape and reappears in the underworld form of the tragic Harlequin a motif that runs through numerous paintings. It may be remarked in passing that Harlequin is an ancient chthonic god ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 211
Now some Christian mystics have a different experience. For instance we have a Swiss mystic, Niklaus von der Flüe. He experienced a God and a Goddess. Then there was a mystic of the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Digulleville, who wrote the Pèlerinage de l’âme de Jésus Christ. Like Dante, he had a vision of the highest paradise as “le ciel d’or,” and there upon a throne one thousand times more bright than the sun sat le Roi, who is God himself, and beside him on a crystal throne of brownish hue, la Reine, presumably the Earth.
This is a vision outside the Trinity idea, a mystical experience of an archetypal nature which includes the feminine principle. The Trinity is a dogmatic image based on an archetype of an exclusively masculine nature. In the Early Church the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as feminine was declared a heresy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 221
Thus the Gnostics thought that Christ had cut off his shadow, and I have never heard that he embodies evil as Yahweh explicitly does. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1633
Jung has been given the title “Gnostic” which he has rejected. ~Reverend David Cox, CW 18, Para 1641
The designation of my “system” as “Gnostic” is an invention of my theological critics. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1642
I loved the Gnostics in spite of everything, because they recognized the necessity of some further raisonnement, entirely absent in the Christian cosmos. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1643
The people who call me a Gnostic cannot understand that I am a psychologist, describing modes of psychic behaviour precisely like a biologist studying the instinctual activities of insects. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1647
“Many are called, but few are chosen” is an authentic logion and not characteristic of Gnosticism alone. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1641
The urgent therapeutic necessity of confronting the individual with his own dark side is a secular continuation of the Christian development of consciousness and leads to phenomena of assimilation similar to those found in Gnosticism, the Kabbala, and Hermetic philosophy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1517
Gnosticism is still an obscure affair and in need of explanation, despite the fact that sundry personages have already approached it from the most diverse angles and tried their hands at explanations with doubtful success. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1478
But the philologist or theologian who concerns himself with Gnosticism generally possesses not a shred of psychiatric knowledge, which must always be called upon in explaining extraordinary mental phenomena. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1479
The explanation of Gnostic ideas “in terms of themselves,” i.e., in terms of their historical foundations, is futile, for in that way they are reduced only to their less developed forestages but not understood in their actual significance. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1479
The archetypal motifs of the unconscious are the psychic source of Gnostic ideas, of delusional ideas (especially of the paranoid schizophrenic forms), of symbol-formation in dreams, and of active imagination in the course of an analytical treatment of neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1480
In the light of these reflections, I regret Dr. Quispel’s quotations from the Gnostics, that the “Autopator contained in himself all things, in [a state of] unconsciousness (iv ayvtoaria)” and that “The Father was devoid of consciousness (avevvorjros)” as a fundamental discovery for the psychology of Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1481
But if you are faced with a good judge of men, he will extract your painful secrets from your trouser pocket with the greatest skill without your knowing it and do it much better than was ever done by a psychodiagnostic method. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1459
In the light of these reflections, I regret Dr. Quispel’s quotations from the Gnostics, that the “Autopator contained in himself all things, in [a state of] unconsciousness (iv ayvtoaria)” and that “The Father was devoid of consciousness (avevvorjros)” as a fundamental discovery for the psychology of Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1481
Now some Christian mystics have a different experience. For instance we have a Swiss mystic, Niklaus von der Flüe. He experienced a God and a Goddess. Then there was a mystic of the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Digulleville, who wrote the Pèlerinage de l’âme de Jésus Christ. Like Dante, he had a vision of the highest paradise as “le ciel d’or,” and there upon a throne one thousand times more bright than the sun sat le Roi, who is God himself, and beside him on a crystal throne of brownish hue, la Reine, presumably the Earth.
This is a vision outside the Trinity idea, a mystical experience of an archetypal nature which includes the feminine principle. The Trinity is a dogmatic image based on an archetype of an exclusively masculine nature. In the Early Church the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as feminine was declared a heresy ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 221
Gnosticism long ago projected this state of affairs into the heavens, in the form of a metaphysical drama: ego-consciousness appearing as the vain demiurge, who fancies himself the sole creator of the world and the Self as the highest, unknowable God, whose emanation the demiurge is. The union of conscious and unconscious in the individuation process, the real core of the ethical problem, was projected in the form of a drama of redemption and, in some Gnostic systems, consisted in the demiurge’s discovery and recognition of the highest God ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1419
One has only to think of the Jewish-Gnostic presuppositions in Paul’s writings and of the immense influence of the “gnostic” gospel of John. Apart also from these important witnesses, and in spite of being persecuted, branded as heresy, and pronounced dead within the realm of the Church, Gnosticism did not die out at once by any means ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1480
Gnosticism’s philosophical and psychological aspects went on developing in alchemy up to the time of Goethe, and the Jewish syncretism of the age of Philo found its continuation within orthodox Judaism in the Kabbala. Both these trends, if not exactly forestages of the modern psychology of the unconscious, are at all events well-nigh inexhaustible sources of knowledge for the psychologist.
This is no accident inasmuch as parallel phenomena to the empirically established contents of the collective unconscious underlie the earliest Gnostic systems. The archetypal motifs of the unconscious are the psychic source of Gnostic ideas, of delusional ideas (especially of the paranoid schizophrenic forms), of symbol-formation in dreams, and of active imagination in the course of an analytical treatment of neurosis ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1480
For my private use I call the sphere of paradoxical existence, i.e., the instinctive unconscious, the Pleroma, a term borrowed from Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 60.
It is of course extremely difficult, in judging Gnostic images, to tell how much is genuine inner experience and how much is philosophical superstructure. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 553.
Behind Gretchen stands the Gnostic sequence: Helen-Mary-Sophia. They represent a real Platonic world of ideas (thinking and sensation on the mystic level). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 265.
But science cannot possibly establish that, or to what extent, this unknowable substrate is in both cases God. This can be decided only by dogmatics or faith, as for instance in Islamic philosophy ( Al-Ghazzali), which explained gravitation as the will of Allah. This is Gnosticism with its characteristic overstepping of epistemological barriers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 54
Unfortunately I have no copy of the letter to the Prot. Theologian. But I will send you an offprint of my answer to Buber who has called me a Gnostic. He does not understand psychic reality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 61.
I would abandon the term “Gnostic” without compunction were it not a swearword in the mouths of theologians. They accuse me of the very same fault they commit themselves: presumptuous disregard of epistemological barriers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 147.
Nobody would assume that the biological pattern is a philosophical assumption like the Platonic idea or a Gnostic hypostasis. The same is true of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 152.
You overlook the facts and then think that the name is the fact, and thus you reach the nonsensical conclusion that I hypostatize ideas and am therefore a “Gnostic.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.
Considering that the light of Christ is accompanied by the “dark night of the soul” that St. John of the Cross spoke about, and by what the Gnostics of lrenaeus called the umbra Christi, which is identical with the chthonic aspect mentioned above, the life of Christ is identical in us, from the psychological point of view, with the unconscious tendency toward individuation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.
Somehow, as the Gnostics surmised, we have “collected” ourselves from out of the cosmos. That is why the idea of “gathering the seeds of light” played such an important role in their systems and in Manichaeism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.
Buber has been led astray by a poem in Gnostic style I made 44 years ago for a friend’s birthday celebration (a private print!), a poetic paraphrase of the psychology of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 571.
I postulate the psyche as something real. But this hypothesis can hardly be called “gnostic” any more than the atomic theory can. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 55.
But I wonder how it comes that so many people think I am a gnostic while equally many others accuse me of being an agnostic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 55.
I therefore don’t quite understand how you can smell “gnostic” arrogance in this attitude. In strictest contrast to Gnosticism and theology, I confine myself to the psychology of anthropomorphic ideas and have never maintained that I possess the slightest trace of metaphysical knowledge. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 65.
It is evident that Buber has a bad conscience, as he publishes only his letters and does not represent me fairly, since I am a mere Gnostic, though he hasn’t the faintest idea of what the Gnostic was moved by. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 101.
In strictest contrast to Gnosticism and theology, I confine myself to the psychology of anthropomorphic ideas and have never maintained that I possess the slightest trace of metaphysical knowledge. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 64.
But becoming Man, he becomes at the same time a definite being, which is this and not that. Thus the very first thing Christ must do is to sever himself from his shadow and call it the devil (sorry, but the Gnostics of Irenaeus already knew it!). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 135.
You overlook the facts and then think that the name is the fact, and thus you reach the nonsensical conclusion that I hypostatize ideas and am therefore a “Gnostic.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.
It seems to me one more proof of the overweening gnostic tendency in philosophical thinking to ascribe to God qualities which are the product of our own anthropomorphic formulations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 254.
Mythology as a vital psychic phenomenon is as necessary as it is unavoidable. In this discussion, it seems to me, the gnostic danger of ousting the unknowable and incomprehensible and unutterable God by philosophems and mythologems must be clearly recognized, so that nothing is shoved in between human consciousness and the primordial numinous experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 256.
What Buber misunderstands as Gnosticism is psychiatric observation, of which he obviously knows nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 570.
Somehow, as the Gnostics surmised, we have “collected” ourselves from out of the cosmos. That is why the idea of “gathering the seeds of light played such an important role in their systems and in Manichaeism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.
At all events, he [Jung] told me more than once that the first parallels he found to his own experience were in the Gnostic texts, that is, those reported in the Elenchos of Hippolytus. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work by Barbara Hannah, Page 84,
This paper, as Jung said in his Preface, analyzes the psychological transition from antiquity to Christianity, whereas his own part of the book deals with the Christian era and tries to illuminate it by Christian, Gnostic, and alchemistic symbols of the Self. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 215
I, too, have the feeling that this is a time full of marvels, and, if the ‘auguries do not deceive us, it may very well be that, thanks to your discoveries, we are on the threshold of something really sensational, which I scarcely know how to describe except with the Gnostic ‘concept of (Sophia) an Alexandrian term particularly suited to the reincarnation of ancient wisdom in the shape of psychoanalysis. ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Pages 438-441
I have the feeling that this is a time full of marvels, and, if the auguries do not deceive us, it may very well be that we are on the threshold of something really sensational, which I scarcely know how to describe except with the Gnostic concept of [Sophia], an Alexandrian term particularly suited to the reincarnation of ancient wisdom in the shape of ΨA. ~Carl Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters, Page 439
The child had a premonition of the instinctual hell into which she will enter. In alchemy, this state of instinctual hell is represented as a snake with three heads, the so-called serpens mercurii. It leads the soul into the afterworld and is identical with the Gnostic Nous. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 203
It is the famous symbolism of the vessel, a symbolism that survives till 1925—see Parsifal. It is the Holy Grail, called the Vase of Sin
(see King: The Gnostics and Their Remains). Also it is a symbol of the early Gnostics. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 107
The snake is a personification of the unconscious, for, as early as the Gnostics, it was used as a symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, where the vegetative psyche is localized. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.
The snake in alchemy is the “mercurial serpent”, the old Gnostic image for the Nous, the mind, where the spirit was represented as a serpent, as the Agathodaemon (the good daemon), or directly called the serpent of the Nous. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.
Since the time of the old Gnostics, the serpent has been the symbol for the brain and its appendages; that is, for the lower centres of the brain and for the spinal cord, partly on account of its shape, but also from introspective reasons. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.
Christianity really arose from the spirit of Gnosticism, but came into conflict with it later, because the Gnostics threatened to dissolve Christianity with their philosophical speculations. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 162.
These signs appear in Gnosticism, St. Paul’s sayings are undoubtedly connected with Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.
On Gnostic gems we find the symbol of the vase, the vase of sin. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.
What I feel to be the resultant of my ancestors’ lives, or a karma acquired in a previous personal life, might perhaps equally well be an impersonal archetype which today presses hard on everyone and has taken a particular hold upon me an archetype such as, for example, the development over the centuries of the divine triad and its confrontation with the feminine principle; or the still pending answer to the Gnostic question as to the origin of evil, or, to put it another way, the incompleteness of the Christian God-image. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 316
The old question posed by the Gnostics, “Whence comes evil?” has been given no answer by the Christian world, and Origen’s cautious suggestion of a possible redemption of the devil was termed a heresy. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 332
Between 1918 and 1926 1 had seriously studied the Gnostic writers, for they too had been confronted with the primal world of the unconscious and had dealt with its contents, with images that were obviously contaminated with the world of instinct. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 201
But the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 201
As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism or Neo-Platonism to the contemporary world. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 201
Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 201
The motif of the Yahweh and Creator-God reappeared in the Freudian myth of the primal father and the gloomy superego deriving from that father. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 201
The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 205
The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 205
Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 182
It [Faust] is a link in the Aurea Catena which has existed from the beginnings of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 189
Or if not atheism, then Gnosticism anything, heaven forbid, but a psychic reality like the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 348
The motif of the Gnostic Yahweh and Creator-God reappeared in the Freudian myth of the primal father and the gloomy superego deriving from that father. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 201
The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 205
I read like mad and worked with feverish interest through a mountain of mythological material, then through the Gnostic writers, and ended in total confusion. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 162
The Gnosticism of which John the Evangelist is a descendent is certainly Jewish, but in its essence Hellenistic, in the style of Philo Judaeus, who also originated the Logos doctrine. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 207
But it was very important for me to see John as a product of Gnosticism (the Jewish school, even, and not the Greek, according to the latest discoveries in the Jordan Valley). ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 205
A woman is oriented towards the animus because it is the son of the unknown father, the Old Sage, whom she never comes to know. This motive is hinted at in the Gnostic texts where Sophia in her madness loves the Great Father On the other hand a man does not know the mother of the anima. She may be personified, for example, in Sophia or the seven times veiled Isis. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
They [Gnostics] were concerned with the problem of archetypes and made a peculiar philosophy of it. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17.
The old mystical meaning of Christ was the perfect man who was the realization of the gnostic Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Man, lifted up and perfected to the most perfect man. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 286
It is quite possible that it is a quotation from some magic book in a sort of Hebrew. The Gnostics fabricated any number of them in faulty Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, even inventing artificial words. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 293
At the Reformation two things happened which upset the absolute attitude of that day: (a) Crucifixes were found in Mexico, which undermined the belief in the uniqueness of the Christian religion where the crucifixion was the central teaching, (b) The rediscovery of Gnosticism, the Dionysian myth and so forth, which showed that teachings similar to Christianity had been prevalent before the birth of Christ. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 15.
The study of Gnostic traditions nevertheless left him [Jung] unsatisfied. For one thing, they were not less than seventeen or eighteen hundred years old and too remote historically for him to establish a living link with them. For another, the tradition that might have connected the Gnostics with the present seemed to him to have been broken. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.
From the numerical standpoint they differ in that the alchemical conception is characterized by the quaternity-in keeping with the Gnostic saying “In the Four is God” whereas the Christian conception found its most differentiated expression in the Holy Trinity. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 63.
It is the famous symbolism of the vessel, a symbolism that survives till 1925—see Parsifal. It is the Holy Grail, called the Vase of Sin (see King: The Gnostics and Their Remains). Also it is a symbol of the early Gnostics. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 107
My whole life I have worked to know the soul and these people [Valentinian Gnostics] already knew it. ~Carl Jung to Gilles Quispel, Meeting with Jung, Page 150.
He mentioned “a hell” of a trick her Christian name Mary played with him, as he was thinking of Gnostic texts and the name Maria. ~William Schoenl – C.G. Jung-His Friendships with Mary Mellon & J.B. Priestley, Page 7-8
I asked him [Jung] about the hermetic philosophy. He said it all hung together, in a way, with the Cabbalistic philosophy and the Gnostics, but the Hermetic philosophy was older than the Cabbalistic philosophy. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 171
The four [forms], as it were, a frame for the one, accentuated as the centre. By unfolding into four it acquires distinct characteristics and can therefore be known. So long as a thing is in the unconscious it has no recognizable qualities and is consequently merged with the universal unknown, with the unconscious All and Nothing, with what the Gnostics called a “non-existent all-being.”
But as soon as the unconscious content enters the sphere of consciousness it has already split into the “four,” that is to say it can become an object of experience only by virtue of the four basic functions of consciousness. It is perceived as something that exists (sensation); it is recognized as this and distinguished from that (thinking); it is evaluated as pleasant or unpleasant, etc. (feeling); and finally, intuition tells us where it came from and where it is going.
The splitting into four has the same significance as the division of the horizon into four quarters, or the year into four seasons. That is, through the act of becoming conscious the four basic aspects of a whole judgment are rendered visible. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 121
During one of their first meetings, Peter showed Joe one of Jung’s paintings of a Gnostic mandala. Joe was fascinated by Gnostic philosophy, which held the belief that those who professed Gnosticism had a special knowledge and understanding of the profound spiritual mysteries. ~Diana Baynes, Jung’s Apprentice, Page 205
As a result he [Jung] produced the “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos,” a kind of poem in Gnostic style, which differs from the other fantasies by its concentrated language and content. ~Aniela Jaffe, From the Life and Work of C.G. Jung, Page 104
On the stone walls of his tower he had carved sentences from the Gnostics and the Egyptian alchemists; he had also outlined mandalas and other magic symbols. ~Ruth Bailey, Jung-Hesse A Friendship, Page 98.
‘It [Gnostic Ring] is Egyptian,’ ‘Here the serpent is carved, which symbolizes Christ. Above it, the face of a woman; below the number 8, which is a symbol of the Infinite, of the Labyrinth, and of the Road to the Unconscious. I have changed one or two things on the ring so that the symbol will be Christian. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Hesse A Friendship, Page 101
The Gnostics, in their way, attained to a similar deep understanding of Christ as symbol of the Self, but they were caught in an inflation. They felt themselves to be superior to the “blind multitude,” in possession of a mystery which set them apart. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 233
This is the dweller, and this is the house of the dweller. “He is the house and the dweller in the house,” as the Gnostics say. These ideas are well known practically as far back as the seventeenth century. ~Carl Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process, Page 200
The Gnostics, the Christian Ophites, took Christ to be the serpent in Paradise, the One who was sent by the Father of the spiritual world to teach consciousness to the first unconscious human pair in Paradise. ~Carl Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process, Page 290
Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. “Gnosticism.” ~Carl Jung, Footnote #13, CW 11, Page 45.
I have Gnosis so far as I have immediate experience, and my models are greatly helped by the representations collectives of all religions. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1643
It is your theological standpoint that is a gnosis, not my empiricism, of which you obviously haven’t the faintest inkling. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.
I grant you that I am on the best way to delivering up the Christian concept of the spirit to the chaos of Gnosis again, from which it was so carefully insulated. But in my view the spirit is alive only when it is an adventure eternally renewed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 90-93
The Gnosis is a disturber of the peace of the Church, but it is full of psychological truths, many yet undiscovered. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.
This leads us over to the secret gnosis of the Middle Ages, when it takes the form of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198
In the history of Gnosis, this figure [Lawgiver and Master of the Past] plays a great role, and every sect claims to have been founded by such a one. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 101
Cabbala was the mystic philosophy of the Jews, a contemporary of hermetic philosophy. Cabbala is a Greek philosophy and is the ‘Gnosis’ of the Jews, and still going in Galicia, and in Poland in the Jewish sector. ~Carl Jung, Jung My Mother and I, Page 172-173
The Christian principles of love and faith kept knowledge at a distance. In the Christian sphere the pneumatikoi would accordingly get the lower rating, since they were distinguished merely by the possession of Gnosis, i.e., knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 14
Gnosis, which in reality is a passion for thinking and knowing, he [Tertullian] attacked with unrelenting fanaticism, together with philosophy and science which differed from it so little ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 17
With the sacrificium intellectus [by Tertullian] philosophy and science, and hence also Gnosis, fell to the ground ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 19
Through castration Origen freed himself from the sensuality that was coupled with Gnosticism; he could then surrender without fear to the treasures of Gnostic thought, whereas Tertullian through his sacrifice of the intellect turned away from Gnosis but also reached a depth of religious feeling that we miss in Origen ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 26
Tertullian’s most valuable organ was the intellect and the clarity of knowledge it made possible. Through the sacrificium intellectus the way of purely intellectual development was closed to him; it forced him to recognize the irrational dynamism of his soul as the foundation of his being. The intellectuality of Gnosis, the specifically rational stamp it gave to the dynamic phenomena of the soul, must have been odious to him, for that was just the way he had to forsake in order to acknowledge the principle of feeling ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 20
Moreover owes, its continued existence, and its form on the one hand to so-called “revealed” or immediate experiences of the “Gnosis “for instance, the God-man, the Cross, the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, and so on, and on the other hand to the ceaseless collaboration of many minds over many centuries ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 81
This was the time when the Greeks started criticizing the world, the time of “gnosis” in its widest sense, which ultimately gave birth to Christianity. The archetype of the redeemer-god and Original Man is age-old we simply do not know how old.
The Son, the revealed god, who voluntarily or involuntarily offers himself for sacrifice as a man, in order to create the world or redeem it from evil, can be traced back to the Purusha of Indian philosophy, and is also found in the Persian conception of the Original Man, Gayomart. Gayomart, son of the god of light, falls victim to the darkness, from which he must be set free in order to redeem the world. He is the prototype of the Gnostic redeemer-figures and of the teachings concerning Christ, redeemer of mankind ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 202
The divisive and separative function of the sword, which is of such importance in alchemy, is prefigured in the flaming sword of the angel that separated our first parents from paradise. Separation by a sword is a theme that can also be found in the Gnosis of the Ophites: the earthly cosmos is surrounded by a ring of fire which at the same time encloses paradise.
But paradise and the ring of fire are separated by the “flaming sword.” An important interpretation of this flaming sword is given in Simon Magus: there is an incorruptible essence potentially present in every human being, the divine pneuma, “which is stationed above and below in the stream of water.” Simon says of this pneuma: “I and thou, thou before me. I, who am after thee.” It is a force “that generates itself, that causes itself to grow; it is its own mother, sister, bride, daughter; its own son, mother, father; a unity, a root of the whole.”
It is the very ground of existence, the procreative urge, which is of fiery origin. Fire is related to blood, which “is fashioned warm and ruddy like fire” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 359
The Churches, of course, continued to exist because they were maintained by the strictly religious needs of the public, but they lost their leadership in the cultural sphere. While the Church of Rome, thanks to her unsurpassed organization, remained a unity, Protestantism split into nearly four hundred denominations. This is a proof on the one hand of its incompetence, and, on the other, of a religious vitality which refuses to be stifled. Gradually, in the course of the nineteenth century, this led to syncretistic outgrowths and to the importation on a mass scale of exotic religious systems, such as the religion of Abdul Baha, the Sufi sects, the Ramakrishna Mission, Buddhism, and so on.
Many of these systems, for instance anthroposophy, were syncretized with Christian elements. The resultant picture corresponds roughly to the Hellenistic syncretism of the third and fourth centuries A.D., which likewise showed traces of Indian thought. (Cf. Apollonius of Tyana, the Orphic-Pythagorean secret doctrines, the Gnosis, etc.) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 861
Since the Apocalypse we now know again that God is not only to be loved, but also to be feared. He fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. This involves man in a new responsibility.
He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures. Since he has been granted an almost godlike power, he can no longer remain blind and unconscious. He must know something of God’s nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747
If the spiritual adventure of our time is the exposure of human consciousness to the undefined and indefinable, there would seem to be good reasons for thinking that even the Boundless is pervaded by psychic laws, which no man invented, but of which he has “gnosis” in the symbolism of Christian dogma. Only heedless fools will wish to destroy this; the lover of the soul, never. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 168
“As a shadow continually follows the body of one who walks in the sun … so our Adamic hermaphrodite, though he appears in masculine form, nevertheless always carries about with him Eve, or his feminine part, hidden in his body.” ~Dominicus Gnosius cited by Carl Jung, CW 11, fn 22
Evil and matter together form the Dyad, the duality (fig. 156) . This is feminine in nature, an anima mundi, the feminine Physis who longs for the embrace of the One, the Monad, the good and perfect. The Justinian Gnosis depicts her as Edem, virgin above, serpent below (fig. 157) . Vengefully she strives against the Pneuma because, in the shape of the demiurge, the second form of God, he faithlessly abandoned her. She is “the divine soul imprisoned in the elements,” whom it is the task of alchemy to redeem. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 413
I hope the reader will not be outraged if my exposition sounds like a Gnostic myth. We are moving here in those psychological regions where, as a matter of fact, the Gnosis is rooted. The message of the Christian symbol is Gnosis, and the compensation effected by the unconscious is Gnosis in an even higher degree. Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes deal with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative speech. ~Carl Jung, CW 12 Para 28
In so far as the tree symbolizes the opus and the transformation process “tam ethice quam physice” (both morally and physically), it also signifies the life process in general. Its identity with Mercurius, the spiritus vegetativus, confirms this view.
Since the opus is a life, death, and rebirth mystery, the tree as well acquires this significance and in addition the quality of wisdom, as we have seen from the view of the Barbeliots reported in Irenaeus: “From man [= Anthropos] and gnosis is born the tree, which they also call gnosis.” In the Gnosis of Justin, the angel Baruch, named the “wood of life,” is the angel of revelation, just as the sun-and-moon tree in the Romance of Alexander foretells the future. ~Carl Jung, CW 13. Para 459
It is clear from this text that the “hidden” thing, the invisible centre, is Adam Kadmon, the Original Man of Jewish gnosis. It is he who laments in the “prisons” of the darkness, and who is personified by the black Shulamite of the Song of Songs. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 44
Gnosis is characterized by the hypostatizing of psychological apperceptions, i.e., by the integration of archetypal contents beyond the revealed “truth” of the Gospels. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1647
I grant you that I am on the best way to delivering up the Christian concept of the spirit to the chaos of Gnosis again, from which it was so carefully insulated. But in my view the spirit is alive only when it is an adventure eternally renewed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 90-93
They [Symbols] are just no Gnosis, no metaphysical assertions. They are partly even futile or dubious attempts at pronouncing the ineffable. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 291.
The characteristic difference is that God’s incarnation is understood to be a historical fact in the Christian belief, while in the Jewish Gnosis it is an entirely pleromatic process symbolized by the concentration of the supreme triad of Kether, Hokhmah, and Binah in the figure of Tifereth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 92.
Scholem is certainly all wet when he thinks that the Jewish Gnosis contains nothing of the Christian mystery. It contains practically the whole of it, but in its unrevealed pleromatic state. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 92.
Jung’s creative libido was already flowing into his greatest book, the Mysterium Coniunctionis, and he felt he could not divert it in order to write a lecture for the Eranos Tagung that year, whose theme was “Old Sun Cults and the Symbolism of Light in Gnosis and Early Christianity.” ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 198
In the history of Gnosis, this figure plays a great role, and every sect claims to have been founded by such a one. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 101
These various formulations indicate the same being that we find in the Gnosis as the ethereal man, light and diaphanous, identical with gold, diamond, carbuncle, the Grail, and, in Indian philosophy, with the Purusha or personified as Christ or Buddha. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 118.
I use the word “Gnosis” intentionally, because alchemy retained, or rediscovered, a great many things which played a very important role in the early days of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 162
