[The Gnostic] cross had exactly the same function that the atman or Self has always had for the East
It is interesting to note that in the Kabbalah, which has been aptly called Jewish Gnosticism, the unitary concept is amplified and modified by the image of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with its ten vessels, twenty-two paths and countless hierarchies of angelic, planetary, zodiacal and other attributions.
Similarly, Islamic mysticism, which has appropriated many features of the Kabbalah, takes on a symbolic dimension of complex imagery, totally different from the stark, unimaginative worship of the solitary, transcendental God Allah in orthodox Muslim practice.
Everywhere Gnosis appears, the many appear to supplement the one, even if not replacing it totally.
“Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in the types and images,” thus declares one of the celebrated treatises of the Nag Hammadi collection, the Gospel of Philip.
Images and images of images bring the light of the Pleroma to earth for the enlightenment and healing of human souls.
To believe is vastly inferior to perceiving the symbols whereby truth is revealed.
The symbols of the Gnostics were not artificially created glyphs and disguises for dogmatic or philosophical preachments; rather they resembled Jung’s own concept of true symbols, which regards a symbol, not as describing something outside of itself, but as containing the mystery within its own structure.
No wonder Jung stated that the Gnostics gave a better symbolic expression to the spiritual and transformative content of the unconscious than their orthodox fellows and successors.
Jung regarded Gnostic symbols as natural symbols, having an organic relationship to the archetypes of the collective unconscious and being spontaneous expressions of the interior realities of the soul, from whence the religious experience originates.
Thus regarding the cross and the figure of Christ as found in Gnosticism, Jung explicitly stated:
[The Gnostic] cross had exactly the same function that the atman or Self has always had for the East . . . . [The] Gn0stic Christ figure and the cross are counterparts of the typical mandalas spontaneously produced by the unconscious.
They are natural symbols and they differ fundamentally from the dogmatic figure of Christ in whom all darkness is expressly lacking. ― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung, Page 128-129
