Directory:
Jung and Gnostic Tradition
The Red Book Lectures
The Zurich Lectures: Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis
Remembering Sophia
J.R.R. Tolkien:
An Imaginative Life
Lectures and Writings by Lance Owens
Return to Gnosis Archive
The Hermeneutics of Vision:
C. G. Jung and Liber Novus
Jung and Aion:
Time, Vision and a Wayfaring Man
C. G. Jung and the
Tradition of Gnosis
Jung in Love:
The Mysterium in Liber Novus
Lectures and Publications by Lance S. Owens
The following materials are available online in the Gnostic Society Library
Seminars and lectures available online (mp3 podcast audio format)The Red Book Lectures: Two seminars introducing C. G. Jung's Red Book: Liber Novus. The first introductory series was delivered in 2010 and is comprised of four lectures. The second seminar, presented in 2011-12, is much more detailed and includes fourteen lectures.
C. G. Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis: A collection of lectures delivered at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 2013 detailing Jung's earliest association with the tradition of Gnosis.
The Search for Roots: A ninety minute lecture introducing Dr. Alfred Ribi's new book, and the foreword to the book authored by Dr. Owens. This lecture provides important new documentation on Jung's first encounter with Gnostic tradition in 1915. (Click the link to listen.)
Remembering Sophia: A two part seminar, with a total of ten lectures, exploring the Gnostic myth of Sophia and its relationship to the psychology of C. G. Jung.
J. R. R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life: Three illustrated lectures discussing the imaginative experiences of Tolkien. The third lecture includes comments on Tolkien's "Red Book" and its relationship to Jung's "Red Book."
Jung, Tolkien and the Hermeneutics of Vision. This talk was delivered at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco on October 23, 2015. It goes into much greater detail on the relationships of Tolkien, Jung and their imaginative journeys. (A video version of the talk is also available, below.)
Tolkien and Jung: An audio interview with Dr. Owens conducted by Miguel Conner in 2011. Material from the three lectures on Tolkien is discussed in the interview. (Click to listen or download).
Publications in Jung Studies
The following monograph-length articles, when read in sequence, provide a comprehensive introduction to C. G. Jung and his Red Book. (They are provided here in reprint pdf editions, and are available to view or download on Academia.edu and ResearchGate, or by direct download here.)
The Hermeneutics of Vision: C. G. Jung and the Red Book (2010)This essay provides an introduction to the Red Book, with particular focus on the visionary experience that were foundational to Jung's work. (View on Academia.edu — Download pdf)
Jung and Aion: Time, Vision and a Wayfaring Man (2011)C. G. Jung stated in 1957 that the visionary experiences recorded in The Red Book: Liber Novus were the foundation of his life work. Jung composed the first page of Liber Novus in 1915. On this introductory folio leaf he graphically intertwined a prophecy of the future and the coming of a new aeon: an epochal turning-point in human consciousness. The first manuscript page of Liber Novus penned by Jung in 1915 – deeply considered, dense with verbal and pictorial imagery formed in response to the Spirit of the Depths – and the complexly crafted commentary in Aion, composed three decades later, are fundamentally wed. They both declare the dawning of a new aeon. While each work might be studied as an independent text, one can only comprehend Jung and his struggle with Liber Novus in their conjunction. (View on Academia.edu — Download pdf)
Foreword to The Search for Roots: C. G. Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis (2013)In this extended Foreword to Alfred Ribi's The Search for Roots, Dr. Owens evaluates Jung's encounter with Gnostic tradition while composing his Red Book: Liber Novus. Dr. Owens delivers a fascinating and historically well-documented account of how Gnostic mythology entered into Jung's personal mythology in the Red Book. Gnostic mythology thereafter provided to Jung a prototypical image of his individuation process. (View on Academia.edu — Download pdf)
C. G. Jung and the Red Book: Liber Novus (2014)Authored with Stephan A. Hoeller for the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, 2nd ed., Springer Publications, 2014 — this articles provides a concise introduction and overview of Jung's Red Book. (Full text is available to view or download on Academia.edu and ResearchGate.)
Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus (2015)Love was the great mystery in C. G. Jung's life. His confrontation with love for a woman and a feminine soul animated the composition of Jung's great Red Book, the book he formally titled Liber Novus.
C. G. Jung's relationships with women during these central years of life have generated several commentaries and critiques. But the power and depth of love has figured little in most of the romances about this period patched together by biographers, dramatists, and psychoanalysts. In consequence, a crux experience of Jung's life has been miscast and little understood.
Three decades after the events chronicled in his Red Book, C. G. Jung turned to writing a commentary on the still hidden records. In Jung in Love, Lance Owens illustrates how Jung's four last books—his "last quartet" of major works published after 1945—are summary statements about his experiences during the years he labored with Liber Novus.
Owens illustrates how in the first volume of this "last quartet"—The Psychology of the Transference, published in 1946—Jung employed a sixteenth-century alchemical text to provide context for what is in fact a statement about his own experience with love recounted both in his private journals and in Liber Novus.
Based on long-sequestered documentary sources, Jung in Love offers a balanced and historically contextualized account of Jung's relationships with four women during the years that led him into the visionary experiences recorded in the Red Book: Emma Jung-Rauschenbach, Sabina Spielrein, Maria Moltzer and Toni Wolff.
Jung in Love - The Mysterium in Liber Novus was originally published as a chapter in Das Rote Buch – C. G. Jungs Reise zum anderen Pol der Welt, ed. Thomas Arzt (Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2015). The book is available at amazon.co.uk and amazon.de
The monograph English edition of Jung in Love is now also available at amazon.com.
A digital edition (pdf) of Jung in Love is available for download on academia.edu.
C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann The Zaddik, Sophia and the Shekinah (2016)
Erich Neumann (1905-1961) was indisputably one of C. G. Jung’s most brilliant and creative disciples. Publication in 2015 of the correspondence between Neumann and Jung—Analytical Psychology in Exile: The Correspondence of C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann—has opened new perspectives on the work of both men and stimulated a resurgent interest in Erich Neumann. Neumann’s encounter with Jung, begun in 1933 at age twenty-nine, was the transformative event in his life. But to a degree, the influence eventually went both ways; Neumann induced new perceptions in Jung.
From the mid-1930s onward, interchanges with Neumann enhanced Jung’s understanding of the mystical depths of Jewish tradition, particularly of Kabbalah and early Hasidism. Neumann undoubtedly played a crucial role in Jung’s astonishing declaration—recorded in 1955, during an eightieth birthday interview—that “the Hasidic Rabbi Baer from Meseritz, whom they called the Great Maggid” was the person who “anticipated my entire psychol-ogy in the eighteenth century.”
This paper was originally presented in a Symposium: "Creative Minds in Dialogue - The Relationship between C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann," Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California, June 24–26, 2016. Publication forthcoming. (View or download at Academia.edu or Researchgate.net.)
Jung and the Prophet Puzzle (2017)
The Red Book: Liber Novus is a volume that defies categorization or comparison; it resounds with voices beyond our common ken. Though a singularly modern document, it is nevertheless transcribed and presented in the form of a medieval manuscript. And since its belated publication in 2009, it has proved to be a work that perplexes most people who venture into its visionary domain. Whether one approaches Liber Novus as a historian, a psychologist, a literary critic, or simply as an interested reader, the puzzle is the same: What was Carl Gustav Jung doing, what was happening to him? Is this record to be interpreted as an imaginative literary creation, the product of an incipient psychosis, or a psychological work veiled in prophetic language?
Of course, Liber Novus is none of those latter things. To meet this book, one must apprehend that C.G. Jung elaborated Liber Novus in the form of a revelation; it is a message to mankind at a critical juncture in human history. (View or download at Academia.edu and Researchgate.net)
Video Presentation
Jung, Tolkien and the Hermeneutics of Vision. This talk was delivered at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco on October 23, 2015. It is available on YouTube.
(An audio-only version of the lecture is also available -- click here to download or listen to the mp3 audio version.)
Publications in Mormon Studies
Recent Book Reviews
Review: C. G. Jung, The Red Book – Reader's Edition
Review: Sonu Shamdasani, C. G. Jung: A Biography in Books (a copy of the published review is also available here).
Gnostic Studies
The Gnosis Archive – gnosis.org – is compiled and edited by Lance Owens; the library section of the archive includes many short essays by Dr. Owens introducing various documents and collections. The following links offer a sample of this material:
The Gospel of Thomas Collection
The Secret Book of John Collection
Brief Biographical Information
Lance S. Owens is a physician in clinical practice. Dr. Owens completed his undergraduate studies in History at Georgetown University and Utah State University. He received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1978, and then completed post-doctoral training at UCLA. For the last thirty-five years he has been in clinical practice as a specialist in Emergency and Trauma Medicine. He is an attending physician on the clinical faculty of the University of Utah.
Dr. Owens began his study of C. G. Jung with Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller in the 1980’s. In 1994 he was ordained a Gnostic priest and has served as a parish priest of the Ecclesia Gnostica. In 1995 he established The Gnosis Archive, gnosis.org and continues as the editor of this major Internet archive of classical Gnostic writings. For several years Dr. Owens taught a semester-long course on “The Life and Work of C. G. Jung” at the University of Utah. He continues to lecture frequently on C. G. Jung, Jungian psychology, and Gnostic tradition. Since release of the Red Book in 2009, Dr. Owens has published five major historical studies focused on Jung, the Red Book, and Jung’s Gnostic vision. In 2013, he presented a course at the Jung Institute in Zurich on “Jung and Gnostic Tradition.” His article on "C.G. Jung and the Red Book” appears in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (Springer Reference, 2014). Many of his published writings and audio lectures are available online.
In addition to his professional work, in 1980 Owens led the first American mountaineering expedition to enter the People's Republic of China, climbing Minya Konka in eastern Tibet. In 1986 he led the first American mountaineering expedition to the North Ridge of K2, the world's second highest mountain. Now old and gray, he has long since retired from this type of insane activity.