Gnostic Antecedents of Jung’s Key Concepts by Craig Chalquist, PhD

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).

Self-rebalancing: of the Pleroma after willful Sophia’s creative and disturbing actions. Mead gives an example: when the Demiurge emanates from lower Sophia,”The various phases have been brought about by the light globes acting on the ‘darker’ ones. But now a new change takes place. There is an interaction of ‘dark’ globes; and the result is no longer a perfect sphere innate with motion, but an amorphous mass, in one sense out of the Plērōma, as being lower than it, or not of its nature. When this takes place, the whole system endeavours, as it were, to right itself, just as the organs and corpuscles of the human body do when anything goes wrong in it, for the Plērōma is the spiritual body of the Heavenly Man. …From every one of the thirty æons, as it were, there shoots forth a ray, and all the rays somehow or other, form a new æon or globe of light, which rounds off the amorphous mass, or ‘abortion,’ burns it into shape, enters into it, and finally carries it back to the rest” (Mead, 2008).

See Personification. The Gnostics recognized various kinds of conflict and anguish as influences of specific aeonic and archontic beings. Especially splitting: Sophia loses her light and divides into a higher and a lower; the lower splits off the Demiurge, who aligns with archons (shadows of aeons) to create a divided world; a heavenly Christ watches over the earthly Jesus. “The creation itself was formed through the mother by the Demiurge (as it were without his knowledge), after the image of things invisible” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

Finding and redeeming figures of light among the faces of confusing darkness and painful rupture is a core Gnostic competency.

Dreams were important guidance for Gnostics, according to patristic sources. For example, Hippolytus (2011) lists the interpretation of dreams as a practice of the followers of Simon Magus. So does Irenaeus (2012), who refers to “Paredri” (familiars) and “Oniropompi” (dream-senders). He also notes that Sige, or Silence, partners with the Father to produce offspring like images in a dreaming.

The ordinary state of consciousness in need of deepening and transformation by gnosis.

In a discussion about the will in Pseudo-Clement’s Recognitions, Simon Magus wonders about the limits to the will’s comprehension of anything at all. “For just as the Demiurge, moved by Wisdom without his knowledge, thinks that he is a free agent, so also do men” (Schaff, 2009).

In Pistis Sophia Jesus scolds some of the male disciplines for their (ego-bound) confusion and assures them all, “Yet a little while and I will tell you the mystery of the universe and the fulness of the universe… in fulness will I perfect you in all fulness and in all perfection and in all mysteries, which are the perfection of all perfections and the fulness of all fulnesses and the gnosis of all gnoses,—those which are in my Vesture [robe of light]. I will tell you all mysteries from the exteriors of the exteriors to the interiors of the interiors” (Mead, 1921d).  

The Faustus depicted in St. Augustine’s In Reply to Faustus the Manichaean offers arguments like Jung’s on behalf of evidence over belief: “For my part, I have read the prophets with the most eager attention, and have found no such prophecies. And surely it shows a weak faith not to believe in Christ without proofs and testimonies” (Augustine & Schaff, 2011). (I have observed elsewhere (2009) that Jung’s personal myth seems to have been Faust.)

“…When Celsus says in express words, ‘If they would answer me, not as if I were asking for information, for I am acquainted with all their opinions, but because I take an equal interest in them all, it would be well. And if they will not, but will keep reiterating, as they generally do, ‘Do not investigate,’ etc., they must, he continues, explain to me at least of what nature these things are of which they speak, and whence they are derived,’ etc.” (Robert, 1885c). “If these (meaning the Christians) bring forward this person, and others, again, a different individual (as the Christ), while the common and ready cry of all parties is, ‘Believe, if thou wilt be saved, or else begone,’ what shall those do who are in earnest about their salvation? Shall they cast the dice, in order to divine whither they may betake themselves, and whom they shall join?”

(Robert, 1885a).

Found in Heraclitus rather than the Gnostics (where it is implied, however) as mentioned and quoted in Hippolytus, who attacks the Gnostics for being Heraclitean: “‘Contrariety is the progenitor of all,'” and day and night, good and bad, twisted and straight, are one: “‘The way up and the way down are the same'” (2011).

“It came to pass then, when they [tyrannical archons] fought against the light, that they were weakened all together one with another, were dashed down in the æons and became as the inhabitants of the earth, dead and without breath of life” (Mead, 1921e).

In the Recognitions of Pseudo-Clement, Simon Magus advises, “Wherefore, do not invoke peace, but rather battle, which is the mother of peace” (Schaff, 2009).

“Now, in their system, Love forms the world incorruptible (and) eternal, as they suppose. For substance and the world are one. Discord, however, separates and puts asunder, and evinces numerous attempts by subdividing to form the world…And the fabricator of the generation of all things produced is, according to them, Discord; whereas Love, on the other hand, manages and provides for the universe in such a manner that it enjoys permanence” (Hippolytus, 2011).

The Gnostics believed evil started long before humans arrived. Many of their gods (“archons”) are evil. The Gnostic heroine Norea recognizes this, thus her assertive discrimination: when an angel comes down to see her, Norea does not bow or marvel but asks, “Who are you?”

Origen: “I do not understand how Celsus, while admitting the existence of Providence, at least so far as appears from the language of this book, can say that there never existed (at any time) either more or fewer evils, but, as it were, a fixed number; thus annihilating the beautiful doctrine regarding the indefinite s nature of evil, and asserting that evil, even in its own nature, is infinite” (Robert, 1885d).

On evil’s relativity: “Celsus has made a statement regarding evils of the following nature, viz., that ‘although a thing may seem to you to be evil, it is by no means certain that it is so; for you do not know what is of advantage to yourself, or to another, or to the whole world'” (Robert, 1885d).

Most people forget their divine origins, succumbing to common and materialistic worldly concerns (“the flesh of ignorance”). Also, many Gnostic texts describe immense transformations of consciousness undergone by circles of participants in a variety of rituals.

However, these circles were sharply distinguished from the psychikoi and hylikoi masses who knew nothing of gnosis and never would. “And Jesus, the compassionate, answered and said unto Mary: “Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the kingdom of heaven more than all thy brethren” (Mead, 1921f).

Image is key to Gnostic cosmology, in which all beings, powers, and worlds emanate as copies (living images) of originals in the pleroma.

“…Valentinus writes: ‘As far removed as is the [dead image] from the living face, so far is the [phenomenal] world removed from the living æon [the noumenal]. What then is the cause of the image? The majesty of the [living] face, [or person,] which exhibits the type [of the universe] to the painter, and in order that it [the universe] may be honoured by its name [—the name or real being of the majesty of the godhead]….The ‘image’ is the work of Sophia or Wisdom, who is the ‘painter’ who transfers the types from the noumenal spaces on to the canvas of the phenomenal world, and the ‘true God'” or the ‘God of truth’ is the creator of the noumenal world, which contains the types of all things” (Mead, 2008)

Origen from Contra Celsum, quoting the “heretic” Celsus: “‘For who, unless he be utterly childish in his simplicity, can take these for gods, and not for offerings consecrated to the service of the gods, or images representing them? But if we are not to regard these as representing the Divine Being, seeing that God has a different form, as the Persians concur with them in saying, then let them take care that they do not contradict themselves; for they say that God made man His own image, and that He gave him a form like to Himself'” (Robert, 1885e).

Also: “‘If these idols are nothing, what harm will there be in taking part in the feast? On the other hand, if they are demons, it is certain that they too are God’s creatures, and that we must believe in them, sacrifice to them according to the laws, and pray to them that they may be propitious.'” (“Demon” here may be a deliberate distortion of daimon.)

“They style themselves Gnostics. They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

Gnosis: realization of completion, perfection, and wholeness through inner contemplation of divine powers, beings, and planes of existence.

Pursuit of Gnosis through conscious encounters with imaginal beings stationed at various levels. “Man (teaches the Gnosis we are endeavouring to recover from Hippolytus) is subject to generation and suffering so long as he remains in potentiality; but, once that his ‘imaging forth’ is accomplished, he becomes like unto God, and, freed from the bonds of suffering and birth, he attains perfection” —from Mead, 2008, where he also writes, “This ‘robe of power’ is presumably the highest spiritual body, or principium individuitatis, which participates of the divine and human natures, that is to say, opens up the realms of the divine world to the man, and makes him a partaker of eternal being.” (“Principium individuitatis” also shows up in Jung’s Gnostic Seven Sermons, attributed to Basilides but spoken imaginally by Philemon. The Sermons contain in storied form the germ of the bulk of Jung’s later theorizing.)

“…Knowledge of the unspeakable Greatness is itself perfect redemption. For since both defect and passion flowed from ignorance, the whole substance of what was thus formed is destroyed by knowledge; and therefore knowledge is the redemption of the inner man” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012). As Faustus tells St. Augustine in Reply to Faustus, “‘For you think that it is the old or outer or earthy man that is said to have been made by God; while we apply this to the heavenly man, giving the superiority to the inner or new man'” (Augustine & Schaff, 2011).

From the Naassene Psalm: “I, bearing the seal, shall descend and wander all Aeons through, all mysteries reveal. I shall manifest the forms of the gods and teach them the secrets of the holy way which I call Gnosis” (Hippolytus, 2011).

“According to Simon, therefore, there exists that which is blessed and incorruptible in a latent condition in every one—(that is, potentially, not actually; and that this is He who stood, stands, and is to stand. He has stood above in unbegotten power. He stands below, when in the stream of waters He was begotten in a likeness. He is to stand above, beside the blessed indefinite power, if He be fashioned into an image” (Hippolytus, 2011).

The Gnostics seem not to have believed that gnosis was for everyone: “Animal men [psychikoi], again, are instructed in animal things; such men, namely, as are established by their works, and by a mere faith, while they have not perfect knowledge. We of the Church, they say, are these persons. Wherefore also they maintain that good works are necessary to us, for that otherwise it is impossible we should be saved. But as to themselves, they hold that they shall be entirely and undoubtedly saved, not by means of conduct, but because they are spiritual by nature” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

Many texts describe gnosis with the symbol of a tree, which is also a key symbol for Jung.

The Gnostics thought that gnosis proceeded via differentiation: “Now since we existed in separation, Jesus was baptised that the undivided should be divided until he should unite us with them in the Pleroma that we ‘the many’ having become ‘one,’ might all be mingled in in the One which was divided for our sakes” (Clement & Casey, 1934).

Some Gnostics believed that gnosis could even influence the pleroma: “…The Father, being unknown, wished to be known to the Aeons, and through his own thought, as if he had known himself, he put forth the Only-Begotten, the spirit of Knowledge which is in Knowledge…Yet that which sees and is seen cannot be formless or incorporeal. But they see not with an eye of sense, but with the eye of mind, such as the Father provided” (Clement & Casey, 1934). The alternative was to fall unconscious under the sway of the archons and their “deep sleep.”

The arrogance and unconsciousness that overtook the light-filled Demiurge, who forgot about the pleroma, and his followers, who believed themselves children of the true God. The heresiologists also criticize Basilides and others for taking themselves for the Messiah or for the highest God.

According to Mead, Simon Magus referred to a daemon that could take possession of a person by pretending to be the soul (2006).

According to Origen, Celsus warns against identification with and inflation by the magic powers of nature: “‘Care, however, must be taken lest any one, by familiarizing his mind with these matters, should become too much engrossed with them, and lest, through an excessive regard for the body, he should have his mind turned away from higher things, and allow them to pass into oblivion. For perhaps we ought not to despise the opinion of those wise men who say that most of the earth-demons are taken up with carnal indulgence, blood, odours, sweet sounds, and other such sensual things; and therefore they are unable to do more than heal the body, or foretell the fortunes of men and cities, and do other such things as relate to this mortal life'” (Robert, 1885e).

Gnosis heals inflation: “Those, then, who know these things have been freed from the principalities who formed the world” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).  

An energy of divine light flows back and forth between Sophia, the Demiurge, and human beings. One can be filled with or emptied of it.

Hippolytus: “According to Simon, therefore, there exists that which is blessed and incorruptible in a latent condition in every one—that is, potentially, not actually; and that this is He who stood, stands, and is to stand…. He is to stand above, beside the blessed indefinite power, if He be fashioned into an image. The originating principle of the generation of things begotten is from fire, the beginning of the desire of the generation is from fire. Wherefore the desire after mutable generation is denominated ‘to be inflamed'” (2011).

In the Bruce Codex are elaborate Gnostic circles and diagrams Jung would have thought of as psychic in nature (see below this table for some examples). For the Gnostics they depicted the various gates and interior structures of Treasuries of Light in the pleroma.

Origen, who complains of elaborate Gnostic diagrams with “circles upon circles”: “Celsus next relates other fables, to the effect that ‘certain persons return to the shapes of the archontics, so that some are called lions, others bulls, others dragons, or eagles, or bears, or dogs.’ We found also in the diagram which we possessed, and which Celsus called the ‘square pattern,’ the statements made by these unhappy beings concerning the gates of Paradise. The flaming sword was depicted as the diameter of a flaming circle, and as if mounting guard over the tree of knowledge and of life” (Robert, 1885a).

From Chapter XXXVIII comes a description of a Gnostic mandala: “Now, in the diagram referred to, we found the greater and the lesser circle, upon the diameter of which was inscribed ‘Father and Son;’ and between the greater circle (in which the lesser was contained) and another composed of two circles,—the outer one of which was yellow, and the inner blue,—a barrier inscribed in the shape of a hatchet. And above it, a short circle, close to the greater of the two former, having the inscription ‘Love;’ and lower down, one touching the same circle, with the word ‘Life.’ And on the second circle, which was intertwined with and included two other circles, another figure, like a rhomboid, (entitled) ‘The foresight of wisdom.’ And within their point of common section was ‘The nature of wisdom.’ And above their point of common section was a circle, on which was inscribed ‘Knowledge;’ and lower down another, on which was the inscription, ‘Understanding.'”

Mead refers to “the Proasteioi up to the Æther; that is to say, the hierarchies of powers as far as the æther, which were probably represented diagramatically by a series of concentric circles, a “proasteion” being the space round a city’s walls” (2008).

Dreaming myth onward: what the Gnostics did with Genesis and other biblical stories, updating them, adapting them (as Irenaeus puts it), and subjectivizing their relevance.

“Those instructed in the Mysteries were practised in the science of mythology, and thus the learned Gnostics at once perceived the mythological nature of the Exodus and its adaptability to a mystical interpretation…The difference between Gnostic exegesis and that of the subsequent Orthodox, is that the former tried to discover soul-processes in the myths and parables of scripture, whereas the Orthodox regarded a theological and dogmatic interpretation as alone legitimate” (Mead, 2008).

Also from Mead: “For whether we interpret their allegories from the macrocosmic or microcosmic standpoint, it is ever the evolution of the mind that the initiates of old have sought to teach us. The emanation and evolution of the world-mind in cosmogenesis, and of the human mind in anthropogenesis, is ever the main interest of the secret science” (2008).

Not only the descent of Odysseus as related by Homer, but that of Sophia, Nous, and Jesus into matter, flesh, and darkness in service to ultimate restoration and renewal (see Apocatastasis above). For the Gnostics the entire manifest Creation is a kind of universal descent.

The Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex states, “And he brought them forth from the darkness of the matter which was mother to them, and he said to them that light existed because they did not yet know light, whether it existed or not” (Schmidt & Macdermot, 1997, p. 277).

It goes on: “…And the mother of all things, who is hidden in every place, who is the thought of every aeon. And she is the concept of every god and every lord. And she is the gnosis of every invisible one. And thy image is the mother of every incomprehensible one. And it is the power of every infinite one.”

Elaborate Pythagorean-style calculations appear in Gnostic texts. “But the first monad became a principle, according to substance, of the numbers, which (principle) is a male monad, pro-creating paternally all the rest of the numbers. Secondly, the duad is a female number, which by the arithmeticians is also itself denominated even. Thirdly, the triad is a male number; this also it has been the usual custom of arithmeticians to style odd. In addition to all these, the tetrad is a female number; and this same, because it is feminine, is likewise denominated even” (Hippolytus, 2011). The First Book of Jeu gives number code combinations for use when encountering archons to bypass.

Many Gnostic texts describe states of joy and awe uttered by those who are spiritually transformed by the gnosis. “And when Jesus had finished sealing them with this seal, in that moment the archons took away all their evil from the disciples. And they rejoiced with very great joy….and became immortal, and they followed Jesus to all the places to which they were to go” (Schmidt & Macdermot, 1977,  p. 116).

“And the disciples had not seen Jesus because of the great light in which he was, or which was about him; for their eyes were darkened because of the great light in which he was. But they saw only the light, which shot forth many light-rays. And the light-rays were not like one another, but the light was of divers kind, and it was of divers type, from below upwards, one [ray] more excellent than the other, . . ., in one great immeasurable glory of light; it stretched from under the earth right up to heaven.—And when the disciples saw that light, they fell into great fear and great agitation” (Maed, 1921g).

Naming and disidentifying with archons as one passes them on the way heavenward. “When you come to this place, seals yourselves with this seal: [missing]. This is its name: [ missing ] while the cipher 70331 is in your hand. Furthermore say this name [missing ] three times, and the watchers and the veils are drawn back, until you go to the place of their Father and he gives you his seal and his name and you cross over the gate into his treasury” Schmidt & Macdermot, 1997, p. 83).

Pervasive throughout Gnostic myth as higher and lower, inner and outer, left and right, feminine and masculine, spiritual and material, etc. Charles William King writes that Gnosticism attempted to found a science of faith founded on antitheses. “Faustus has displayed his ingenuity, in the remarks to which I am now replying, by making for himself a long list of opposites—health and sickness, riches and poverty, white and black, cold and hot, sweet and bitter” (St. Augustine & Schaff, 2011).

From St. Augustine’s “Concerning Two Souls”: “They say that there are two kinds of souls, the one good, which is in such a way from God, that it is said not to have been made by Him out of any material or out of nothing, but to have proceeded as a certain part from the very substance itself of God; the other evil, which they believe and strive to get others to believe pertains to God in no way whatever; and so they maintain that the one is the perfection of good, but the other the perfection of evil, and that these two classes were at one time distinct but are now commingled” (Augustine & Schaff, 2014).

“Fate is a union of many opposing forces and they are invisible and unseen, guiding the course of the stars and governing through them” (Clement & Casey, 1934).

“…There are other bodies, vestures, or vehicles of consciousness, besides the gross physical ‘coat of skin,’ for the use of the spiritual man, each being an ‘appearance’ in comparison to the higher vehicle, which is in its turn an ‘appearance’ to that which is more subtle and less material or substantial than itself” (Mead, 2006).

St. Augustine describes the Gnostic idea of a spiritual man who puts on an earthly body and disguises his true nature (Augustine & Schaff, 2011). After descending, Jesus takes on the form and aspect of an ordinary man in order to fool the archons and the humans under their sway. Basilideans believed Jesus to be a material form (“garment”) assumed by the true heavenly Christ, who abandoned it just before the crucifixion. “Remember thy Glorious Robe,” cautions the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl, “Thy Splendid Mantle Remember / To put on and wear as adornment… Their filthy and unclean garments / I stripped off and left in their country” (http://gnosis.org/library/hymnpearl.htm).

In Pseudo-Clement’s Recognitions, Simon Magus boasts, “I can render statues animated, so that those who see suppose that they are men….I can change my countenance, so that I cannot be recognised; but I can show people that I have two faces” (Ch. IX). He tells his followers, “Therefore I have pretended to be a man, that I might more clearly ascertain if you cherish entire affection towards me” (Schaff, 2009).

Evidently Gnostic practitioners placed a high value on persona: “And as the son was unknown to all, so must they also be known by no one; but while they know all, and pass through all, they themselves remain invisible and unknown to all; for, “Do thou,” they say, “know all, but let nobody know thee” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012). “And all their bonds with which they were bound, were unloosed and every one left his order, and they all fell down before me, adored and said: ‘How hath the lord of the universe passed through us without our knowing?'” (Mead, 1885h).

Nearly all basic Gnostic processes and forces are personified as characters (sometimes called “hypostases,” “copies,” or “images”) who have long lists of esoteric names.

To name a few of the most common personifications: Bythos, Logos, Nous, Sige, Barbelo, Forethought, Eleleth, Aleitheia, Sophia, Autogenes, Seth / Setheus, Christ, Eve, Adam, the Serpent (also known as the Instructor), Norea, Zoe, Ialdabaoth, Sabaoth, and the various ranks of aeons and archons, including Abraxas. Some Greek gods show up as well: Ouranos, Gaia, Kronos, Chaos, Dionysus, Metis… Simon Magus shows up as a personification in Jung’s Red Book.

In Charles William King Jung found a remark by Epiphanius about the Gnostic preference for “their personified Principalities; in a word, at their fondness for images” (2008, p. 232).

A Valentinian Gnostic idea. St. Augustine also touches on it: “But while the body occupies a small material space, the mind revolves images of vast extent, of heaven and earth, with no want of room, though they come and go in crowds; so that clearly, the mind is not diffused through space: for instead of being contained in images of the largest spaces, it rather contains them; not, however, in any material receptacle, but by a mysterious faculty or power, by which it can increase or diminish them, can contract them within narrow limits, or expand them indefinitely, can arrange or disarrange them at pleasure, can multiply them or reduce them to a few or to one” (Augustine & Schaff, 2014).

Implied in all Gnostic texts, each of which treats its treasuries, gods, realms, spirits, daemons, rulers, and shining structures as more real than “earthly” reality and immediately accessible to consciousness via gnosis. See the quote above under Active Imagination in which Jesus offers to show the disciples the celestial realms.

Gnostic term for the emanation of aeons and other beings from above: the Father projecting Nous and Aleithia (Mind and Truth), who project the other aeons of the pleroma, starting with Nous projecting Logos and Zoe, who projects Anthropos, etc. (Hippolytus, 2011).

In the Books of Jeu Christ projects and emanates not only earthly Jesus, but the Treasuries of Light in the pleroma (Schmidt & Macdermot, 1997).

The Divine Child is a key character in Gnostic creation stories, especially the Sethian. Basilides mentions a Threefold Sonship. Christ describes Mary as the motherly bearer of the boy Jesus.

Simon Magus claims to have formed a child out of the air and made it vanish: a forerunner of the homunculus of Faust and Paracelsus.

The quaternity is basic to Gnostic thought: four Luminaries, the name Barbelo (“God is Four”), the sun forming on the fourth day, the Tetragrammaton, a fourth level of Paradise in which humans were created, four senses, four rivers flowing from Eden, the First Tetrad forming the Ogdoad and projecting the four elements, etc. Irenaus remarks that the Gnostics sought to squeeze a lot of their thought into fours (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

“By the conjunction of Logos and Zoe were brought forth Anthropos and Ecclesia; and thus was formed the first-begotten Ogdoad, the root and substance of all things, called among them by four names, viz., Bythus, and Nous, and Logos, and Anthropos. For each of these is masculo-feminine… And if there are any other things in the Scriptures which can possibly be dragged into the number four, they declare that these had their being with a view to the Tetrad” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

The same Moses Miriam etc. Quaternio as Jung’s in Aion also appears in Hippolytus.

The Autopator, Autogenes, hermaphroditic Adamas, “image of the Perfect Man” (Hippolytus, 2011), and other such primal, celestial figures were copied to make redeemers. Valentinian sources mention our angels being baptized before us. Mead uses the word “Self” in the Fragments: “It is the old teaching of macrocosm and microcosm, and the Self hidden in the heart of all”; “The Self within the heart, the seed of the divine, the pneumatic light-spark, the dweller in light, the inner man, was the eternal pilgrim incarnated in matter; those who had this alive and conscious within them were the spiritual or pneumatic”; “As in the consummation of the universe the World-soul was reunited with the World-mind, so in the perfectioning of the individual the soul was made one with the Self within” (2008).

According to Hippolytus, Marcion links the monad or letter Iota with the primal man and all the beings and groups produced from him (2011). Zosimos the Gnostic alchemist wrote of how the divine Adam or cosmic Anthropos sank into everyone (Umail & Von Franz, p. 63). “You learned men, forsooth, dress up for our benefit some wonderful First Man, who came down from the race of light to war with the race of darkness…” (Augustine & Schaff, 2011).”The Glory looked like my own self. / I saw it in all of me, / And saw me in all of it / That we were twain in distinction, / And yet again one in one likeness” (Hymn of the Pearl). From the 13th Ode to Solomon: “Behold, the Lord is our mirror. Open your eyes and see them in Him. / And learn the manner of your face, then declare praises to His Spirit” (Charlesworth, 2009).

About Celsus Origen complains, “It makes no difference whether the God who is over all things be called by the name of Zeus, which is current among the Greeks, or by that, e.g., which is in use among the Indians or Egyptians” (Robert, 1885c).

“The followers of Valentinus defined the Angel as a Logos having a message from Him who is. And, using the same terminology, they call the Aeons Logoi” (Clement & Charles, 1934).

Jung eventually wrote about Mercurius as a Self figure; likewise Hippolytus reports among the Naassene (snake-worshiping) Gnostics “images of naked men, having both hands stretched aloft towards heaven, and their pudenda erecta, as with the statue of Mercury on Mount Cyllene. And the aforesaid images are figures of the primal man, and of that spiritual one that is born again, in every respect of the same substance with that man…This, he says, is the many-named, thousand-eyed Incomprehensible One, of whom every nature—each, however, differently—is desirous. This, he says, is the word of God, which, he says, is a word of revelation of the Great Power. Wherefore it will be sealed, and hid, and concealed, lying in the habitation where lies the basis of the root of the universe… That which is he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible—(I mean) a point—will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed, the point which is indivisible in the body; and, he says, no one knows this (point) save the spiritual only (2011).

The Nasseenes seem also to have kept the image of the serpent in their temple. “The Son is the Serpent.”

Shadow: a Gnostic term for the darkness cast by Sophia and Christ: “Christ also was not produced from the Æons within the Pleroma, but was brought forth by the mother who had been excluded from it, in virtue of her remembrance of better things, but not without a kind of shadow. He, indeed, as being masculine, having severed the shadow from himself, returned to the Pleroma; but his mother being left with the shadow, and deprived of her spiritual substance, brought forth another son, namely, the Demiurge, whom he also styles the supreme ruler of all those things which are subject to him” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

“Moreover through the persuasion of the twelfth Aeon the whole was instructed, as they say, and shared in his Passion….But the Aeon which wished to grasp that which is beyond knowledge fell into ignorance and formlessness. Whence it effected an abstraction of knowledge which is a shadow of the Name, that is the Son, the form of the Aeons. Thus the distribution of the Name among the Aeons is the loss of the Name” (Clement & Casey, 1934).

The dialogue between St. Augustine and Faustus in the Reply to Faustus resembles that of the devil and the anchorite in Jung’s Red Book. Faustus: “It is true, we believe in two principles; but one we call God, and the other Hyle [matter], or, to use common popular language, the devil” (2011). “As to the Duodecad [a twelve-aeon part of the Pleroma], it is indicated by the zodiacal circle, as it is called; for they affirm that the twelve signs do most manifestly shadow forth the Duodecad, the daughter of Anthropos and Ecclesia” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012). Some texts describe a protective Veil or Limit or Boundary named Staurus or Horos that hangs between the Pleroma and the Kenoma or Hysterema (everything else outside).

In the Pistis Sophia: “Whoso then dwelleth under the help of the Most High, will abide under the shadow of the God of heaven” (Mead, 1921i).

Symbolism is the standard mythic currency of Gnosticism. It deployed signs too, but with a distinction between them (as pointing to the known and to amusingly reified beliefs like a physical Resurrection) and true symbols that were fully animated “images” and “copies” of mysterious divine beings.

“Of this I speak to you in a paradigm, a correspondence, and a similitude, but not in the reality of its configuration; I have not revealed the [whole] word in truth” (Mead, 2008, p. 378).

“…The Lord contrived all things symbolically and by a dispensation toward men, for their conversion and salvation” (“The Mystic Cross,” from the Acts of John: http://gnosis.org/library/hymnjesu.html). “Since all these things are images and symbols, when the truth was made manifest they were translated to another meaning. In their phenomenal appearance and their literal application they were destroyed, but in their spiritual meaning they were restored; the names remained the same but the content was changed” (Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora, in Mead, 2008).

Hippolytes ascribes to Simon Magus the distinction between “secret” (symbolic) and “manifest” (sensory) and criticizes him for finding “allegorical” meanings in sacred stories (2011). Gnostics also referred to symbolic seals and emblems as passes into the pleroma.

Sufferings as voices of repressed and even divine aspects of ourselves: Sophia suffers redemptively when Horos keeps her from being absorbed into the ultimate light; Eve suffers at the hands of archons, as does Norea; Adam and Eve suffer knowledge brought by the Serpent; etc. All are breaches of wholeness, with further sufferings caused by attempts to heal the original wholeness and put the Creation back into harmony and balance.

In the Gnostic cosmos everything and everyone, no matter how unpleasant, dark, or evil, serves a purpose in the whole. Clement attributes this remark to Basilides: “I believe that all who experience the so-called tribulations must have committed sins other than what they realize, and so have been brought to this good end” (Clement & Chadwick, 2002).

A key Gnostic teaching is that “the likeness of that which is below is that which is above” (34th Ode to Solomon, in Charlesworth, 2009). Origen records the criticism by Celsus that Christians ignore oracles: “‘They set no value on the oracles of the Pythian priestess, of the priests of Dodona, of Clarus, of Branchidae, of Jupiter Ammon, and of a multitude of others; although under their guidance we may say that colonies were sent forth, and the whole world peopled. But those sayings which were uttered or not uttered in Judea, after the manner of that country, as indeed they are still delivered among the people of Phoenicia and Palestine—these they look upon as marvellous sayings, and unchangeably true'” (Robert, 1885e).

Additionally: “‘To some the gods have appeared in visible forms. The world is full of such instances. How many cities have been built in obedience to commands received from oracles; how often, in the same way, delivered from disease and famine! Or again, how many cities, from disregard or forgetfulness of these oracles, have perished miserably! How many colonies have been established and made to flourish by following their orders! How many princes and private persons have, from this cause, had prosperity or adversity! How many who mourned over their childlessness, have obtained the blessing they asked for! How many have turned away from themselves the anger of demons! How many who were maimed in their limbs, have had them restored! And again, how many have met with summary punishment for showing want of reverence to the temples—some being instantly seized with madness, others openly confessing their crimes, others having put an end to their lives, and others having become the victims of incurable maladies!'”

“The stars, spiritual bodies, that have communications with the angels set over them, and are governed by them, are not the cause of the production of things, but are signs of what is taking place, and will take place, and have taken place in the case of atmospheric changes, of fruitfulness and barrenness, of pestilence and fevers, and in the case of men. The stars do not in the least degree exert influences, but indicate what is, and will be, and has been” (Clement & Casey, 1934).

“Evidently Simon taught the ancient, immemorial doctrine that the Microcosm Man was the Mirror and Potentiality of the Cosmos, the Macrocosm… Whatever was true of the emanation of the Universe, was also true of Man, whatever was true of the Macrocosmic Aeons was true of the Microcosmic Aeons in Man, which are potentially the same as those of the Cosmos, and will develop into the power and grandeur of the latter, if they can find suitable expression, or a fit vehicle” (Mead, 2006).

Origen quoting Celsus: “‘…As wise men have found it for the express purpose of being able to convey to us some notion of Him who is the first, the unspeakable Being,—a notion, namely; which may represent Him to us through the medium of other objects,—they endeavour either by synthesis, which is the combining of various qualities, or by analysis, which is the separation and setting aside of some qualities, or finally by analogy;—in these ways, I say, they endeavour to set before us that which it is impossible to express in words.’ … Celsus supposes that we may arrive at a knowledge of God either by combining or separating certain things after the methods which mathematicians call synthesis and analysis, or again by analogy, which is employed by them also, and that in this way we may as it were gain admission to the chief good” (Robert, 1885e).

Coniunctio: an alchemical stage, but, long before that, a Gnostic term for the mating of feminine and masculine aeons. “Conjunction” appears often in Hippolytus and Irenaeus. Valentinian Gnosticism is thought to have celebrated it ceremonially by staging a symbolic wedding. “For they declare that we simply receive grace for use, wherefore also it will again be taken away from us; but that they themselves have grace as their own special possession, which has descended from above by means of an unspeakable and indescribable conjunction; and on this account more will be given them. They maintain, therefore, that in every way it is always necessary for them to practise the mystery of conjunction…When all the seed shall have come to perfection, they state that then their mother Achamoth shall pass from the intermediate place, and enter in within the Pleroma, and shall receive as her spouse the Saviour, who sprang from all the Æons, that thus a conjunction may be formed between the Saviour and Sophia, that is, Achamoth. These, then, are the bridegroom and bride, while the nuptial chamber is the full extent of the Pleroma” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

Syzygy refers to female/male aeonic pairs; also known as the “marriage feast.” “…Though there is unity in the Pleroma, each of the Aeons has its own complement, the syzygia. Therefore, whatever come out of a syzygia are complete in themselves (pleromas) and whatever come out of one are images” (Clement & Casey, 1934). From the same work: “Henceforth the spiritual elements having put off their souls, together with the Mother who leads the bridegroom, also lead bridegrooms, their angels, and pass into the bride chamber within the Limit and attain to the vision of the Father, – having become intellectual Aeons, – in the intellectual and eternal marriages of the Syzyge.”

“And hence it is that they are ranged in pairs, one opposite the other; for power is in no wise different from intelligence, inasmuch as they are one. For from those things that are above is discovered power; and from those below, intelligence. So it is, therefore, that likewise what is manifested from these, being unity, is discovered (to be) duality, an hermaphrodite having the female in itself. This, (therefore,) is Mind (subsisting) in Intelligence; and these are separable one from the other, (though both taken together) are one, (and) are discovered in a state of duality” (Hippolytus paraphrasing Simon Magus, 2011). In some accounts the feminine aeon emanates (projects) essence and the male aeon form.

“And the soul leaps continually,” states the Second Book of Jeu, “from place to place, until it reaches the Treasury of Light” (Schmidt & Macdermot, 1997). When Sophia falls she splits into a higher and lower (achamoth) being. Sophia Achamoth suffers panic, terror, despair, sadness, and depression until Christ brings healing to her passions, “separating her from them” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012), after which she reconnects with Bythos, the light above her.

Gnostics suffer similar states before achieving gnosis, whose chief goal is reconnection with the divine. “And they affirm that the soul is very difficult to discover, and hard to understand; for it does not remain in the same figure or the same form invariably, or in one passive condition, that either one could express it by a sign, or comprehend it substantially” (Hippolytus, 2011). From the same work: “Monoïmus himself, accordingly, in his letter to Theophrastus, expressly makes the following statement: ‘Omitting to seek after God, and creation, and things similar to these, seek for Him from (out of) thyself, and learn who it is that absolutely appropriates (unto Himself) all things in thee, and says, My God (is) my mind, my understanding, my soul, my body. And learn from whence are sorrow, and joy, and love, and hatred, and involuntary wakefulness, and involuntary drowsiness, and involuntary anger, and involuntary affection; and if,’ he says, ‘you accurately investigate these (points), you will discover (God) Himself, unity and plurality, in thyself, according to that tittle, and that He finds the outlet (for Deity) to be from thyself.'”

In Against Heresies Irenaeus comments: “They have good reason, as seems to me, why they should not feel inclined to teach these things to all in public, but only to such as are able to pay a high price for an acquaintance with such profound mysteries” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012). Evidently, billing was an issue even back then.

Aeonic pairings produce new beings, realms, orders of reality, including the intermediate realm called the Midst; see Aeon, Projection. “And the essences of the principles, the Sethians say, are light and darkness. And in the midst of these is pure spirit; and the spirit, they say, is that which is placed intermediate between darkness, which is below, and light, which is above” (Hippolytus, 2011).

Because Ialdabaoth / Abraxas holds a mediating position between the realms while creating the world, the transcendent function could also be called the demiurgic function. In Against Heresies Irenaeus refers to him as “the Framer (Demiurge) of things material and animal, of those on the right and those on the left, of the light and of the heavy, and of those tending upwards as well as of those tending downwards” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012). Tertullian writes, “Afterwards broke out the heretic Basilides. He affirms that there is a supreme Deity, by name Abraxas, by whom was created Mind, which in Greek he calls Nous; that thence sprang the Word; that of Him issued Providence, Virtue, and Wisdom; that out of these subsequently were made Principalities, powers, and Angels; that there ensued infinite issues and processions of angels” (2011).

“Of the universal Aeons there are two shoots, without beginning or end, springing from one Root, which is the Power invisible, inapprehensible Silence. Of these shoots one is manifested from above, which is the Great Power, the Universal Mind ordering all things, male, and the other, (is manifested) from below, the Great Thought, female, producing all things. Hence pairing with each other, they unite and manifest the Middle Distance, incomprehensible Air, without beginning or end” (Mead, 2006).

“Sophia was the Mediatrix between the upper and lower spaces, and at the same time projected the Types or Ideas of the plērōma into the cosmos” (Mead, 2008, where he also equates Sophia with “Soul” in a general sense).

Valentinian typology recognizes three kinds of people: hylikoi (materialists), psychikoi (or “animal” per Heracleon: believers), and pneumatikoi (spiritual, intuitive). In one system Christ changes the grief of lost Sophia into hylic life, fear into psychic life, and perplexity into Hystera (passion) (Hippolytus, 2011).

Introvert/extravert echoes the Gnostic delineation of “inner, outer, and outermost.” “…The followers of Valentinus maintain that the three places mean those on the left, while the ‘fourth generation’ is their own seed” (Clement & Casey, 1934). “For, say they, of this man one part is rational, another psychical, another earthly. And they suppose that the knowledge of him is the originating principle of the capacity for a knowledge of God” (Hippolytus, 2011).

Gnostic myths portray a realm of darkness outside the pleroma and separated from it by a boundary penetrable only by those who possess gnosis.

St. Augustine described and criticized the Gnostic idea of a realm of darkness adjacent to a realm of the sacred (2014). “On one side the border of the shining and sacred region was the region of darkness, deep and boundless in extent” (Ch. 25). “First of all, he [Manichaeus] makes darkness productive, which is impossible. But, he replies, this darkness was unlike what you are familiar with” (Ch. 32).

“…How does the Darkness, which is beneath everything, support everything so as to be the foundation of all?” (Ephraim & Mitchell, 1912).

The aeon-filled Pleroma of forms and types; its center is the Treasury of Light where God abides. “And all those who will receive that mystery will surpass all gods and all rulerships of all these aeons, which are the twelve aeons of the invisible God, for this is the great mystery of the unapproachable one which is in the treasury of the innermost of the innermost” (Second Book of Jeu, in Schmidt & Macdermot, 1997).

“And each ennead has a monad within it. And in each monad there is a place which is called imperishable, which is the holy land. In the land of each of these monads there is a source. And there are myriads upon myriads of powers receiving crowns upon their heads from the crown of the triple-powered one. And in the midst of the enneads and in the midst of the monads is the immeasurable deep. And the All, those within and those without, looks forth upon it. And twelve fatherhoods are above it, thirty powers surrounding each” (Schmidt & Macdermot, 1997).

“Basilides again, that he may appear to have discovered something more sublime and plausible, gives an immense development to his doctrines. He sets forth that Nous was first born of the unborn father, that from him, again, was born Logos, from Logos Phronesis, from Phronesis Sophia and Dynamis, and from Dynamis and Sophia the powers, and principalities, and angels, whom he also calls the first; and that by them the first heaven was made. Then other powers, being formed by emanation from these, created another heaven similar to the first” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012). Irenaeus again: “…The Saviour conferred honour upon the Pleroma by the creation [which he summoned into existence] through means of his Mother, inasmuch as he produced similitudes and images of those things which are above.”

“Since they [our angelic counterparts] may almost be said to need us in order to enter, for without us they are not permitted (therefore not even the Mother has entered with them without us, they say), they are obviously bound for our sake” (Clement & Casey, 1934). Jung would also have been influenced by Mead’s linking up of various stages of consciousness with the brain and spinal chord.

Ialdabaoth is the Demiurge, who does not know his origins and who behaves with blind recklessness until confronted and corrected by Sophia and/or Jesus. “For the Demiurge, they say, knows nothing at all, but is, according to them, devoid of understanding, and silly, and is not conscious of what he is doing or working at” (Hippolytus, 2011). “He formed the heavens, yet was ignorant of the heavens; he fashioned man, yet knew not man; he brought to light the earth, yet had no acquaintance with the earth; and, in like manner, they declare that he was ignorant of the forms of all that he made, and knew not even of the existence of his own mother, but imagined that he himself was all things” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

“Every one who has even a slender knowledge of Greek knows that gospel means good news. But where is your good news, when your God himself is said to weep as under eclipse till the darkness and defilement are removed from his members?” (St. Augustine & Schaff, 2011). Additionally, “…The good things done by a good God you call bad, and ascribe to an evil god, because you feel a childish horror of whatever shocks the frailty of fallen humanity, and a childish pleasure in the opposite. So you think snakes are made by an evil being; while you consider the sun so great a good, that you believe it to be not the creature of God, but an emission from His substance” (Book XXI). (Snakes and the divinity of the Sun figure prominently in Jung’s Red Book.)

“Faustus blames God in the Old Testament for slaughtering thousands of human beings for slight offenses, as Faustus calls them, or for nothing” (Augustus & Schaff, 2011). In Pseudo-Clemeent’s Recognitions Simon Magus claims, “My opinion is, that there is a certain power of immense and ineffable light, whose greatness may be held to be incomprehensible, of which power even the maker of the world is ignorant” (Schaff, 2009). He also calls the creator God “weak” and chastises him for expelling Eve and Adam from Paradise after tempting them with the Tree of Knowledge. “And as a sequel to his non-understanding of the statements regarding the ‘wrath’ of God,” writes Origen about his opponent Celsus, “he continues: ‘Is it not ridiculous to suppose that, whereas a man, who became angry with the Jews, slew them all from the youth upwards, and burned their city (so powerless were they to resist him), the mighty God, as they say, being angry, and indignant, and uttering threats, should, (instead of punishing them,) send His own Son, who endured the sufferings which He did?'” (Robert, 1885f). “There is next to be answered the following query: ‘And how is it that he repents when men become ungrateful and wicked; and finds fault with his own handwork, and hates, and threatens, and destroys his own offspring?'” (Robert, 1885a).

According to Irenaeus, Marcion “advanced the most daring blasphemy against Him who is proclaimed as God by the law and the prophets, declaring Him to be the author of evils, to take delight in war, to be infirm of purpose, and even to be contrary to Himself” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2012).

Referred to by Gnostics as the “deep sleep,” the internal fuzziness in which most people spend their lives.

From Pseudo-Clement: “Do you so far err, Peter, as not to know that our souls were made by that good God, the most excellent of all, but they have been brought down as captives into this world?” (Schaff, 2009).

“For as those that are most asleep think they are most awake, being under the power of dream-visions very vivid and fixed; so those that are most ignorant think that they know most. But blessed are they who rouse themselves from this sleep and derangement, and raise their eyes to the light and the truth” (Clement & Casey, 1934).

An alchemical term from Gerhard Dorn but also descriptive of “the completion of the pleroma” once redeemed souls merge with it.

“Wholeness” is the literal meaning of “pleroma.” Restoring it was the ultimate goal of Gnosticism: “Blessed are we before all men who are on the earth, because the Saviour hath revealed this unto us, and we have received the Fulness [wholeness] and the total completion” (Mead, 1921j).

“This, then, is the kind of man whom they conceive of: he has his animal soul from the Demiurge, his body from the earth, his fleshy part from matter, and his spiritual man from the mother Achamoth” (Irenaeus & Schaff, 2011).

“In addition to all that he has already said,” complains Origen, “Celsus subjoins the following: ‘All things, accordingly, were not made for man, any more than they were made for lions, or eagles, or dolphins, but that this world, as being God’s work, might be perfect and entire in all respects. For this reason all things have been adjusted, not with reference to each other, but with regard to their bearing upon the whole. And God takes care of the whole, and (His) providence will never forsake it…'” (Robert, 1885f). (This entire document attacking Celsus offers a fascinating if inadvertent anticipation of both ecopsychology and of spiritual ecology.)

Simon Magus, legendary founder of Gnosticism, was accompanied by Helena (Sophia, Luna), one of Jung’s anima figures. From Pseudo-Clement’s Recognitions: “…Simon took Luna to himself; and with her he still goes about, as you see, deceiving multitudes, and asserting that he himself is a certain power which is above God the Creator, while Luna, who is with him, has been brought down from the higher heavens, and that she is Wisdom, the mother of all things, for whom, says he, the Greeks and barbarians contending, were able in some measure to see an image of her; but of herself, as she is, as the dweller with the first and only God, they were wholly ignorant…Once, when this Luna of his was in a certain tower, a great multitude had assembled to see her, and were standing around the tower on all sides; but she was seen by all the people to lean forward, and to look out through all the windows of that tower. Many other wonderful things he did and does” (Schaff, 2009).

Simon also had a reputation as a necromancer and as the creator of a homunculus out of air. “And in the greater number of these books is also drawn the representation of a certain aged man, grey-haired, winged, having his pudendum erectum, pursuing a retreating woman of azure colour. And over the aged man is the inscription ‘phaos ruentes,’ and over the woman ‘pereëphicola.’ But ‘phaos ruentes’ appears to be the light (which exists), according to the doctrine of the Sethians, and ‘phicola’ the darkish water; while the space in the midst of these seems to be a harmony constituted from the spirit that is placed between'” (Hippolytus, 2011): Philemon and Salome? According to Charles King, some depictions show the old man’s arms crossed over his breast.