“Gnostic” in The Black Books and The Red Book
The date of this dream is not clear.
The figure of Philemon first appears in the Black Books on January 27, 1914, but without kingfisher wings.
To Jung, Philemon represented superior insight, and was like a guru to him.
He would converse with him in the garden.
He recalled that Philemon evolved out of the figure of Elijah, who had previously appeared in his fantasies: Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration . . .
It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.
Through the conversations with Philemon, the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought .
Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. ~The Red Book, Introduction, Page 201
In his 1959 BBC TV interview, John Freeman asked Jung, “Do you now believe in God?” Jung replied: “Now? [Pause.] Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.” William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull, eds., C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (p. 428).
Philemon’s statement here seems to be the background for this much cited and debated statement.
This emphasis on direct experience also accords with classical Gnosticism. ~The Red Book, Page 348, Footnote 9
The dead had appeared in a fantasy on January 17, 1914, and had said that they were about to go to Jerusalem to pray at the holiest graves.
Their trip had evidently not been successful.
The Septem Sermones ad Mortuos is a culmination of the fantasies of this period.
It is a psychological cosmology cast in the form of a gnostic creation myth.
In Jung’s fantasies, a new God had been born in his soul, the God who is the son of the frogs, Abraxas.
Jung understood this symbolically He saw this figure as representing the uniting of the Christian God with Satan, and hence as depicting a transformation of the Western God-image.
Not until 1952 in Answer to Job did Jung elaborate on this theme in public.
Jung had studied the literature on Gnosticism in the course of his preparatory reading for Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.
In January and October 1915, while on military service, he studied the works of the Gnostics.
After writing the Septem Sermones in the Black Books, Jung recopied it in a calligraphic
script into a separate book, slightly rearranging the sequence.
He added the following inscription under the title: “The seven instructions of the dead. Written by Basilides in Alexandria, the city where the East touches the West.”
He then had this privately printed, adding to the inscription: “Translated from the Greek original into German.”
This legend indicates the stylistic effects on Jung of late-nineteenth-century classical scholarship.
He recalled that he wrote it on the occasion of the founding of the Psychological Club, and regarded it as a gift to Edith Rockefeller McCormick for founding the Club.
He gave copies to friends and confidants.
Presenting a copy to Alphonse Maeder, he wrote:
I could not presume to put my name to it, but chose instead the name of one of those great minds of the early Christian era which Christianity obliterated.
It fell quite unexpectedly into my lap like a ripe fruit at a time of great stress and has kindled a light of hope and comfort for me in my bad hours. ~The Red Book, Introduction, Page 205-206
Sr Jung’s calligraphic and printed versions of the Sermones bear the subheading: “The seven instructions of the dead. Written by Basilides in Alexandria, where the East
touches the West.
Translated from the original Greek text into the German language.” Basil ides was a Christian philosopher in Alexandria in the first part of the second century.
Little is known about his life, and only fragments of his teachings have survived (and none in his own hand) , which present a cosmogonic myth.
For the extant fragments and commentary, see Bentley Layton ed., The Gnostic Scriptures (New York: Doubleday, 1987, pp. 417- 44).
According to Charles King, Basilides was by birth an Egyptian.
Before his conversion to Christianity, he “followed the doctrines of Oriental Gnosis, and endeavored … to combine the tenets of the Christian religion with the Gnostic philosophy.
For this purpose he chose expressions of his own invention, and ingenious symbols” (The Gnostics and their Remains [Bell and Daldy, 1864] , pp. 33-34).
According to Layton, the classical Gnostic myth has the following structure: “Act I.
The expansion of a solitary first principle (god) into a full nonphysical (spiritual) universe. Act II.
Creation of the material universe, including stars, planets, earth, and hell. Act III. Creation of Adam, Eve, and their children. Act IV Subsequent history of the human race” (The Gnostic Scriptures, p. 13).
Thus in its broadest outlines, Jung’s Sermones is presented in the form analogous to a Gnostic myth. Jung discusses Basilides in Aion (1951).
He credits the Gnostics for having found suitable symbolic expressions of the self, and notes that Basilides and Valentinus
“allowed themselves to be influenced in a large measure by natural inner experience. They therefore provide, like the alchemists, a veritable mine of information concerning all those symbols arising out of the repercussions of the Christian message.
At the same time, their ideas compensate the asymmetry of God postulated by the doctrine of the privatio boni, exactly like those well-known modern tendencies of the unconscious to produce symbols of totality for bridging the gap between consciousness and the unconscious” (CW 9, 2, §428).
In 1915, he wrote a letter to a friend from his student days, Rudolf Lichtenhan, who had written a book, Die Ojfenbarung im Gnosticismus (1901).
From Lichtenhan reply dated November II, it appears that Jung had asked for information concerning the conception of different human characters in Gnosticism, and their possible correlation with William James’s distinction between tough- and tender-minded characters (JA).
In Memories, Jung said: “Between 1918 and 1926 I had seriously studied the Gnostics, for they too had been confronted with the primal world of the unconscious.
They had dealt with its contents and images, which were obviously contaminated with the world of drives” (p. 226).
Jung was already reading Gnostic literature in the course of the preparatory reading for Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.
There has been an extensive body of commentaries concerning the Septem Sermones, which provides some valuable discussion.
However, these should be treated cautiously, as they considered the Sermones without the benefit of Uber Novus and the Black Books, and, not least, Philemon’s commentaries, which together provide critical contextual clarification.
Scholars have discussed Jung’s relation to Gnosticism and the historical Basilides, other possible sources and parallels for Sermones, and the relation of the Sermones to Jung’s later works.
See especially Christine Maillard, Les Septem Sermones aux Morts de Carl Gustav Jung (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993).
See also Alfred Ribi, Die Suche nach den eigenen Wurzeln: Die Bedeutung von Gnosis, Hermetik und Alchemiefur C. G. Jung und Marie Louise von Franz und deren Einjfuss auf das moderne Verstiindnis dieser Disziplin (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991); Robert Segal, The Gnostic Jung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Gilles Quispel, “C. G. Jung und die Gnosis,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 37 (1968, reprinted in Segal); E. M. Brenner, “Gnosticism and Psychology: Jung’s Septem Sermones ad Mortuos,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 35 (1990 ); Judith Hub back, “VII Sermones ad mortuos,” Journal of Analytical psychology II (1966); James Heisig, “The VII Sermones: Play and Theory,” Spring (1972); James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy, Yeats and Jung (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 ) , and Stephen Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Wheaton, IL ~est, 1982). ~The Red Book, Page 346
The Pleroma, or fullness, is a term from Gnosticism. It played a central role in the Valentinian system.
Hans Jonas states that “Pleroma is the standard term for the fully explicated manifold of divine characteristics, whose standard number is thirty, forming a hierarchy and together constituting the divine realm”
(The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity [London: Routledge, 1992 ], p. 180).
In 1929, Jung said: “The Gnostics … expressed it as Pleroma, a state of fullness where the pairs of opposites, yea and nay, day and night, are together, then when they ‘become,’ it is either day or night. In the state of ‘promise’ before they become, they are nonexistent, there is neither white nor black, good nor bad” (Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928- 1930, ed. William McGuire [Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], p. 131).
In his later writings, Jung used the term to designate a state of pre-existence and potentiality, identifying it with the Tibetan Bardo: “He must … accustom himself to the idea that ‘time’ is a relative concept and needs to be compensated by the concept of a ‘simultaneous’ Bardo- or pleromatic existence of all historical processes. What exists in the Pleroma as an eternal ‘process’ appears in time as aperiodic sequence, that is to say, it is repeated many times in an irregular pattern” (Answer to job, 1952, CW II, §629; see also §§620, 624,675, 686,727, 733, 748).
The distinction that Jung draws between the Pleroma and the creation has some points of contact with Meister Eckhart’s differentiation between the Godhead and God.
Jung commented on this in Psychological Types (1921, CW 6, §429f).
The relation of Jung’s Pleroma to Eckhart is discussed by Maillard, op cit., pp. n8-20.
In 1955/ 56, Jung equated the Pleroma with the alchemist Gerhardus Dom’s notion of the ‘unus mundus’ (one world) (Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, §660).
Jung adopted this expression to designate the transcendental postulate of the unity underlying the multiplicity of the empirical world (Ibid., §759£). ~The Red Book, Page 347, Footnote 82
In 1932, Jung commented on Abraxas: “the Gnostic symbol Abraxas, a made-up name meaning three hundred and sixty-five … the Gnostics used it as the name of their supreme deity. He was a time god. The philosophy of Bergson, la duree creatrice, is an expression of the same idea.”
Jung described him in a way that echoes his description here: “just as this archetypal world of the collective unconscious is exceedingly paradoxical, always yea and nay, that figure of Abraxas means the beginning and the end, it is life and death, therefore it is represented by a monstrous figure.
It is a monster because it is the life of vegetation in the course of one year, the spring
and the autumn, the summer and the winter, the yea and nay of nature.
So Abraxas is really identical with the Demiurgos, the world creator.
And as such he is surely identical with the Purusha, or with Shiva” (November r6, Visions Seminar, vol. 2, pp. 806-7) .
Jung added that ”Abraxas is usually represented with the head of a fowl, the body of a man, and the tail of a serpent, but there is also the lion-headed symbol with a dragon’s body, the head crowned with the twelve rays, alluding to the number of months” (June 7, 1933, Visions Seminar, vol. 2, p. 1041- 42).
According to St. Irenaeus, Basilides held that “the ruler of them is named Abrasax, and that is why this (ruler) has the number 365 within it” (Layton, ed., The Gnostic Scriptures, p. 425).
Abraxas featured in Albrecht Dieterich’s work, Abraxas. Stud/en zur Religionsgeschichte des spdtern Altertums. Jw1g studied this work closely early in 1913, and his copy is annotated.
Jung also had a copy of Charles King’s The Gnostics and their Remains (London: Bell
and Daldy, 1864) , and there are marginal annotations next to the passage discussing the etymology of Abraxas on p. 37
94 Helios is the Greek Sun God. Jung discussed solar mythologies in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912, CW B, §177f) ~The Red Book, Page 349, Footnote 93
Simon Magus (first century) was a magician.
In the Acts of the Apostles (8:9- 24), after becoming a Christian, he wished to purchase the power of transmitting the Holy Spirit from Peter and Paul (Jung saw this account as a caricature).
Further accounts of him are found in the apocryphal acts of Peter, and in writings of the
Church fathers.
He has been seen as one of the founders of Gnosticism, and in the second century a Simonian sect arose. He is said to have always traveled with a woman, whom he found in a brothel in Tyre, who was the reincarnation of Helen of Troy Jung cited this as an example of the anima figure (“Soul and earth,” 1927, CW 10, §75).
On Simon Magus, see Gilles Quispel, Gnosis als Weltreligion (Zurich: Origo Verlag, 1951), pp. 51-70, and G.R.S. Mead, Simon Magus: An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism Based on the Ancient Sources with a Reevaluation of His Philosophy and Teachings (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1892). ~The Red Book, Page 359, Footnote 154.
In Memories, Jung commented: “In such dream wandering one frequently encounters an old man who is accompanied by a young girl, and examples of such couples are to be found in many mythic tales.
Thus, according to Gnostic tradition, Simon Magus went about with a young girl whom he had picked up in a brothel.
Her name was Helen, and she was regarded as the reincarnation of the Trojan Helen. Klingsor and Kundry, Lao-tzu and the dancing girl, likewise belong in this category” (p. 206). ~The Red Book, Page 359, Footnote 155
The dead had appeared in a fantasy on January 17, 1914, and had said that
they were about to go to Jerusalem to pray at the holiest sepulchre.
Their trip had evidently not been successful.
They returned and posed metaphysical questions.
Jung’s response was to address the questions of the dead and instruct them, through elaborating to them the cosmogony that his soul had described to him.
This took place between December 30, 1916, and January 8, 1917, The Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) can be regarded as a culmination of the fantasies of this period.
It is a psychological cosmogony cast in the form of a Gnostic creation myth.
In Jung’s fantasies, a new God had been born in his soul, the God who is the son of the frogs, Abraxas.
Jung understood this symbolically.
He saw this figure as representing the uniting of the Christian God With Satan, and hence as depicting a transformation of the Western God-image.
It was in 1952, in Answer to Job, that Jung elaborated on this theme. ~The Black Books, Page 49-50.
He had studied the literature on Gnosticism in the course of his preparatory
reading for Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.
In early 1913, he read Dieterich’s Abraxas, still from the perspective of his libido theory.
In January and October 1915, while doing military service, he studied the works of the Gnostics intensively.
He was struck by the closeness of these texts and his own Liber Novus, and also with what he saw as the similarity between the modern epoch and the time of early Christianity.
After writing the Septem Sermones in the Black Books, Jung recopied it in a calligraphic script into a separate book, slightly rearranging the sequence.
He added the following inscription under the title: “The seven instructions of the dead. Written by Basilides in Alexandria, the city where the East touches the West.”
He then had this privately printed, adding to the inscription: “Translated from the Greek original into German.” ~The Black Books, Page 50
There are indications that Jung discussed the material from his self-experimentation with colleagues.
In March 1918 he wrote to Lang, who had sent him some of his own fantasies: as you have observed correctly yourself, it is very important to experience the contents of the unconscious before forming any opinions about it.
I very much agree with you that we have to grapple with the knowledge content of Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism.
These are the systems that contain the materials which are destined to become the foundation of a theory of the unconscious.
I’ve been working on this myself for quite some time, and also have had ample opportunity to compare my experiences at least partially with those of other people.
That’s why I was very pleased to hear pretty much the same opinions from you.
I am glad that all on your own you have discovered this area of work waiting to be tackled.
Up to now, I lacked any co-workers, and I am happy that you want to join forces with me.
I consider it very important that you extricate your own material in an unbiased way from the unconscious, as carefully as possible.
My own material is very voluminous, very complicated, and in part I’ve worked it through up to almost complete, very vivid clarifications.
But what’s completely missing, is modern material to compare it with.
Zarathustra has been formed too consciously.
Meyrink retouches the material in an aesthetic way; furthermore, I feel he is lacking in religious sincerity. ~The Black Books, Page 67
In his view, alchemists had been engaged in something akin to what he called the process of active imagination.
Furthermore, alchemical symbols depicted the process of individuation.
At a historical level, the work had further significance, as the symbolic material was precisely what was excluded by ecclesiastical Christianity and thus had the function of a compensatory undercurrent.
For example, Jung’s vision of the God Abraxas bore striking parallels to the figure of Mercurius in alchemy.
He noted in retrospect that “my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked.”
The Gnostic material he had studied had been too remote from the present, and he believed that alchemy formed the historical bridge between Gnosticism and the psychology of the unconscious.
If his thesis was correct, he would be able to demonstrate that the results of his undertaking were not limited to himself, close associates, and patients but had wider historical and cultural significance.
Had he simply published his patients’ material, their cases could easily have been dismissed as the product of autosuggestion or suggestion, rather than constituting firm empirical evidence.
His philological deciphering of alchemy took place in a series of eight notebooks and an index volume.
He wrote out extensive excerpts from alchemical texts and underlined key phrases, which he then recorded in the index volume.
Call slips in these volumes indicated that he initially conducted extensive research in the Basel University library back in the winter of 1935.
His work in the Black Books and the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus now ceded place to his work in his alchemy notebooks. ~The Black Books, Page 108-109
- In the 1925 seminar, Jung interpreted this episode as follows: “the fight of the two snakes: the white snake means movement into the day, the black into the kingdom of darkness, with moral aspects too.
There was a real conflict in me, a resistance to going down.
My stronger tendency was to go up.
Because I had been so impressed the day before with the cruelty of the place I had seen, I really had a tendency to find a way to the conscious by going up, as I did on the mountain . . .. Elijah said that it was just the same below or above. Compare Dante’s Inferno.
The Gnostics express this same idea in the symbol of the reversed cones.
Thus the mountain and the crater are similar.
There was nothing of conscious structure in these fantasies, they were just events that happened.
So I assume that Dante got his ideas from the same archetypes” (Introduction to Jungian Psychology, pp. 104- 5).
McGuire suggests that Jung is referring to Dante’s conception “of the conical form of the cavity of Hell, with its circles, mirroring in reverse the form of Heaven, with its spheres” (ibid.) .
In Aion, Jung also noted that serpents were a typical pair of opposites, and that the conflict between serpents was a motif found in medieval alchemy (cw 9, pt. 2. § 181). ~The Black Books, Page 191-192, Footnote 225
- During this period, Jung was engaged with the study of Gnostic texts, in which he found historical parallels to his own experiences. See Alfred Ribi, The Search. For Roots: C.G. Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis, trans. Don Reveau, foreword by Lance S. Owens (Los Angeles and Salt Lake City: Gnosis Archive Books, 2013) . ~The Black Books, Page 10, Footnote 40
- See introduction, p. 35. On July 9, Conrad Schneiter gave a presentation before the Association for Analytical Psychology on “Homosexuality in Schreber,” evidently reinterpreting the Memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, which Freud had analyzed .
In the discussion, Jung noted: “For the Gnostics the diabolos causes the descent from the unity and the entering into the multiplicity (the centers of the senses).
The concretistic understanding of symbols is devilish – a soul murder (hence projection onto Flechsig).
This is why the thinking back to the origins is devilish.
(Faust, 2: “So, to the actively eternal creative force, in cold disdain / You now oppose the fist infernal . .. [II. 138off.J).
Because that way the releasing symbol will be destroyed. (The symbol itself is already something releasing)” (MAP, pp. 89 – 90). ~The Black Books, Page 235, Footnote 182