The fundamental dualistic conception, in Gnosticism
The original unity of the world and God is supposed to have been cleft asunder by some prehuman guilt, and the world born of this rupture must accordingly suffer punishment.
The same principle runs through Orphism and Pythagoreanism.
In the view of the Gnostics this feeling of privation became the driving force of the world process, though they introduced a highly paradoxical twist, the reasons for which cannot be analyzed more closely here.
On account of this complex feeling of loss, existence in the world meant being alone and cut off; man was utterly forsaken, abandoned to the alien element.
His original pleromatic home, from which was derived the part worthy of redemption, is clearly uroboric, although too much stress is laid on the spirit-pneuma aspect.
The fundamental dualistic conception, in Gnosticism, of a higher spiritual part and a tower material part presupposes the separation of the World Parents.
Despite that, the pleroma has the uroboric character of completeness,wholeness, undifferentiatedness, wisdom, primordiality, etc., except that here the uroboros has more of a masculine and paternal nature, with feminine Sophia features shining through, in contrast to the maternal uroboros where the transpicuous features are masculine.
Consequently, in Gnosticism, the way of salvation lies in heightening consciousness and returning to the transcendent spirit, with loss of the unconscious side; whereas uroboric salvation through the Great Mother demands the abandonment of the conscious principle and a homecoming to the unconscious.
How powerful these basic archetypal images of the psyche are can be seen from the cabala more clearly than from any other cultural phenomenon.
Judaism has always tried to eliminate the mythologizing tendency and the whole realm of the psyche in favor of consciousness and morality.
But in the esoteric doctrines of the cabala, which is the hidden, pulsing lifeblood of Judaism, a compensatory counter-movement persisted underground.
Not only does the cabala reveal a large number of archetypal dominants, but, through them, it has had an important effect on the development and history of Judaism. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 118-119
Isaac Luria, the most Gnostic of all the Kabbalistic teachers
The religions of the masses demand obedience to God’s will, while the Gnosis demands both obedience and isobedience.
Not all commandments come from the true God, said the ancient Gnostics, for many come from a Demiurge, whose law may be useful to the unenlightened (the psychics, or men of soul) but is counterproductive to the true Gnostics (the pneumatics, or men of spirit).
The will of nature is not that of supernature; the law of the morning which is appropriate for spiritual infants must be broken by those who have progressed to the law of the evening, where the light of differentiated consciousness must be dimmed in order to admit the luminosity of the midnight sun of individuation.
The Jewish Gnosis of the Kabbalah recognized this when it capitalized on the divine statement (in Isaiah 45:7):
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.”
In Kabbalistic writings we encounter the teaching of the two “inclinations” Qeser) and the advice that the Kabbalistic Gnostic is to love God with both of these.
The right-and left-hand pillars of the Tree of Life, and even more the doctrine regarding the terrifying klippoth or evil principles existing in conjunction with the same Tree, bring to our attention a doctrine that postulates evil as a metaphysical reality in God.
Isaac Luria, the most Gnostic of all the Kabbalistic teachers, said that the root of all evil lies in the very nature of divine creation, inasmuch as God created in order to manifest everything hidden in His own mysterious nature.
The Christian mystic Jacob Boehme similarly regarded God’s love and wrath, His brilliant light and burning fire, as belonging inseparably together, both being the effluence of God’s eternal word, for life can only be when good and evil exist together, both in God and in man.
The Kabbalah as well as the more daring forms of Christian mysticism are, of course, rooted in the wisdom of the ancient Gnostics who declared in the Gospel of Philip: “The light and the darkness, life and death, the right and the left, are brothers one to another.
It is not possible to separate them from one another.
Because of this, neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life a life, nor death a death.
Because of this each will be resolved into its origin from the beginning. “‘
We find then that the two manifest principles called in the Second Sermon God and Devil are the two Gnostic categories of our own being, which were ever experienced by those possessing Gnosis as a duality rooted in an underlying unity.
The Self of Jung’s psychology belongs to a transconscious realm, and therefore is not directly susceptible to conscious cognition; it is rather experienced through its good and evil manations.
The former of these might appear as the light and rectitude of the accepted values of consciousness, while the latter is the shadow that accompanies the light and acts as the demonic half of the psyche. ― Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung, Page 81-82
