Passages from a Gnostic Hymn and The Red Book

Gnostic Concept, Image, or Motif

Sophia falls into depressed confusion when separated from Bythos, Adam when first created by Ialdabaoth, and the Demiurge when sucked dry of spiritual vitality by Sophia and by Jesus.

One example of many: “… Sophia became very greatly exhausted, and that lion-faced light-power set to work to take away from Sophia all her light-powers, and all the material powers of Self-willed surrounded Sophia at the same time and pressed her sore” (Mead, 1921a).

Gnosis (inner spiritual knowing) relies on imagination to encounter and converse with aeons (see below) and archons; Jesus provides instructions for this in various texts. “Now, therefore, Mary, there is no form in this world, nor any light, nor any shape, which is comparable to the four-and-twenty invisibles, so that I may liken it to them. But yet a little while and I will lead thee and thy brethren and fellow-disciples into all the regions of the Height and will lead you into the three spaces of the First Mystery, save only the regions of the space of the Ineffable, and ye shall see all their shapes in truth without similitude” (Mead, 1921b).

In the Recognitions of Pseudo-Clement, Simon Magus describes a “new sense” for perceiving God: imagination. Peter admits: “When I was at Capernaum, occupied in the taking of fishes, and sat upon a rock, holding in my hand a hook attached to a line, and fitted for deceiving the fishes, I was so absorbed that I did not feel a fish adhering to it while my mind eagerly ran through my beloved Jerusalem, to which I had frequently gone up, waking, for the sake of offerings and prayers. But I was accustomed also to admire this Caesarea, hearing of it from others, and to long to see it…and I thought of it what was suitable to be thought of a great city, its gates, walls, baths, streets, lanes, markets, and the like, in accordance with what I had seen in other cities….” But, he adds, seeing such images is how demonic possession begins (Schaff, 2009).

“Aeon” is an eternal realm, being, or celestial emanation. All aeons have archetypal names: Logos, Life, Hope, Love, First Thought, Insight, Grace, Prudence, Nameless, Unbegotten, Conception, Spirit, etc. Tangible types and images come forth from the invisible aeons inhabiting the pleroma (“fullness”).

The aeon known as the Demiurge consorts with snakes and bears and wears the head of a lion (compare the cover image of Jung’s book Aion). Archangels are emanations of aeons: archetypal images also described as “psychic” and “spiritual.”

In the First Book of Jeu Jesus tells his disciples that only gnosis can save the soul “from the archon of this aeon and his persecutions…You become whole through a freedom in which there is no blemish” (Schmidt & Macdermot, 1997, p. 46).

An interesting anticipation of alchemy appears in Origen: “After this, Celsus [an early Greek thinker with Gnostic ties], desiring to exhibit his learning in his treatise against us, quotes also certain Persian mysteries, where he says: ‘These things are obscurely hinted at in the accounts of the Persians, and especially in the mysteries of Mithras, which are celebrated amongst them. For in the latter there is a representation…of the following nature: There is a ladder with lofty gates, and on the top of it an eighth gate. The first gate consists of lead, the second of tin, the third of copper, the fourth of iron, the fifth of a mixture of metals, the sixth of silver, and the seventh of gold. The first gate they assign to Saturn, indicating by the ‘lead’ the slowness of this star; the second to Venus, comparing her to the splendour and softness of tin; the third to Jupiter, being firm and solid; the fourth to Mercury, for both Mercury and iron are fit to endure all things, and are money-making and laborious; the fifth to Mars, because, being composed of a mixture of metals, it is varied and unequal; the sixth, of silver, to the Moon; the seventh, of gold, to the Sun,—thus imitating the different colours of the two latter’” (Robert, 1885a).

Similar to the Gnostic proliferation of names, types, levels, connections, etc., as Jung acknowledges. Gnostic texts refer to sources from many mythico-religious systems and presuppose a wide knowledge of philosophy and history on the part of the reader. In the Pistis Sophia, for example, when Jesus asks which song of praise Sophia sang to redeem herself, Mary Magdalene replies, “My Lord, my indweller of light hath ears, and I hear with my light-power, and thy spirit which is with me, hath sobered me. Hearken then that I may speak concerning the repentance which Pistis Sophia hath uttered…Thy light-power hath prophesied thereof aforetime through the prophet David in the sixty-eighth Psalm…” and she quotes all of it (Mead, 1921c).

Jung would have seen other examples of Gnostic amplification in the work of Wilhelm Bousset, about whom Karen King observes, “…He did not intend genealogy to reduce the New Testament Son of Man merely to an ancient fertility rite; rather, genealogy enriched the motif’s field of meaning by supplying it with a complex of connotations and references vastly beyond its usage in specific New Testament literary contexts. The narrow incomprehensibility of Son of Man was replaced by ‘a great interconnected sphere of speculation of a related kind’” (2003, p. 92).

Feminine, masculine, and hermaphroditic figures as outer and inner pairs are basic to Gnosticism. Bythos (Depth) carries feminine and masculine in himself. All four stages of the anima bear the names of key Gnostic characters: Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia, “essence of souls” (Hippolytus, 2011). It could be argued that the guiding figure of Soul/Salome in Jung’s Red Book (2009) is actually a fallen Sophia; Jung compared her and Philemon to the Gnostic characters Helena and Simon Magus (Ribi, 2013).

According to Epiphanes, “The Creator and father of all with his own justice appointed this, just as he gave equally the eye to all to enable them to see. He did not make a distinction between female and male, rational and irrational, nor between anything else at all; rather he shared out sight equally and universally” (http://gnosis.org/library/ephip.htm).

“Now the males from this emanation are the ‘election,’ but the females are the ‘calling’ and they call the male beings angelic, and the females themselves, the superior seed. So also, in the case of Adam, the male remained in him but all the female seed was taken from him and became Eve, from whom the females are derived, as the males are from him” (Clement & Casey, 1934). “Now it is held amongst them, that, for the purpose of honouring the celestial marriages, it is necessary to contemplate and celebrate the mystery always by cleaving to a companion, that, is to a woman; otherwise (they account any man) degenerate, and a bastard to the truth, who spends his life in the world without loving a woman or uniting himself to her” (Tertullian, 2011).

“From the things above is discovered Power, and from those below Thought. In the same manner also that which was manifested from them although being one is yet found as two, the male-female having the female in itself. Thus Mind is in Thought—things inseparable from one another—which although being one are yet found as two…The male (Heaven, i.e., the Nous or Christ, or Spiritual Soul) looks down from above and takes thought for its co-partner (or Syzygy); while the Earth (i.e., the Epinoia or Jesus, or Human Soul) from below receives from the Heaven the intellectual (in the spiritual and philosophical sense, of course) fruits that come down to it and are cognate with the Earth (i.e., of the same nature essentially as Epinoia, who is essentially one with Nous)” (Mead, 2006, p. 21).

“But ‘that which has its being in Him is Life’—the syzygy or consort of the Logos. The Æons came into being through Him, but Life was in him. And she who is in Him, is more akin to Him than they who came into being through Him. For she is united to Him and bears fruit through Him” (Mead, 2008, p. 288).

Anthropos is a frequently appearing Gnostic term for the primal form from which Adam, Seth, Autogenes, and Jesus as earthly redeemers were copied. See Self.

The grand cosmic restoration once all light has been regathered by Sophia (and, in some versions, Christ) into the pleroma (wholeness).

In the words of Heracleon, “And the wage of our Lord is the salvation and restoration (apokatastasis) of those who are harvested, brought about by his resting upon them” (Origen, 2014).

“Then he [Marcus the Gnostic] said, that the restoration of the entire ensued when all the (elements), coming down into the one letter, sounded one and the same pronunciation” (Hippolytus, 2011).

Archetype: Gnostic technical term for a primordial aeonic manifestation. Gnostic literature is packed with aeons, images, forms, seals, and types, the greatest and first of which is Bythos: “Depth.”

“He opened His mouth, and sent forth similar to Himself a Logos….And the pronunciation of the name was of the following description. He was accustomed to utter the first word of the name itself, which was Arche, and the syllable of this was (composed) of four letters…And each of the elements had its own peculiar letters, and its own peculiar form, and its own peculiar pronunciation, as well as figures and images” (Hippolytus, 2011).

Origen: “After this the Jew remarks, manifestly in accordance with the Jewish belief: ‘We certainly hope that there will be a bodily resurrection, and that we shall enjoy an eternal life; and the example and archetype of this will be He who is sent to us, and who will show that nothing is impossible with God’” (Roberts, 1885b). Many Gnostics believed Jesus to be a copy of a celestial (i.e., archetypal) Christ.

“…Each one of the spiritual beings has its own power and its own sphere of action… And the angels, who are intellectual fire and intellectual spirits, have purified natures, but the greatest advance from intellectual fire, completely purified, is intellectual light” (Clement, 1934).

From the First Book of Jeu: “These are the ranks which he has caused to be emanated. And there are twelve ranks in each treasury, these being their type: six heads on this side and six on that, turned toward each other” (Schmidt & Macdermot, 1997, p. 53).

Origin also mentions “Ialdabaoth, who art the rational ruler of a pure mind, and a perfect work to son and father, bearing the symbol of life in the character of a type” (Robert, 1885a). (Ialdabaoth, “the psychic creator of the world” as a benevolent deity, may have been referred to by Jung as Abraxas (Red Book), whose image was often found on stones bearing an image of Mithras.) “…He is the demiurge and maker of this universe and everything in it; and because he is essentially different from these two and is between them, he is rightly given the name, intermediate“—from Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora, in Epiphanius, Against Heresies (in Mead, 2008).

“For just as a seal, when brought into contact with wax, produces a figure, (and yet the seal) itself remains of itself what it was, so also the powers, by coming into communion (one with the other), form all the infinite kinds of animals” (Hippolytus, 2011).

“All genera and species and individuals, nay the heaven and earth itself, are images of ‘seals’; they are produced according to certain pre-existent types. It was from the first concourse of the three original principles or powers that the first great form was produced, the impression of the great seal, namely, heaven and earth” (Mead, 2008).