Carl Gustav Jung
The Gnostic Jung
by Stephan A. Hoeller
The classic translation and interpretation of Jung's VII Sermones.
The Search for Roots:
C.G, Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis
by Alfred Ribi
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The Gnostic Jung
and the Seven Sermons to the DeadAbraxas: Jung’s Gnostic Demiurge in Liber Novus
Archive Notes
In 1982, Dr. Hoeller published a landmark study on C. G. Jung and his relationship with Gnostic tradition: The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. Publication of Jung's Red Book in 2009 has substantiated the views first expressed by Hoeller four decades ago. The Gnostic Jung remains an important introduction to Jung's thought and to the tradition with which Jung felt a life-long allegiance: the tradition of Gnosis.
After publication of The Red Book: Liber Novus in 2009, Dr. Hoeller reevaluated his comments about the figure of Abraxas presented in the Seven Sermons. This important addition to his original commentary on the Seven Sermons to the Dead was published in Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for the Soul under Postmodern Conditions (Chiron Publications, 2017). That essay is reproduced here with permission of the author. It serves as an addendum to the work he originally published in 1982.
Dr. Stephan Hoeller's translation of the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos and his introduction to The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead are both also available in our library collection.
Abraxas: Jung’s Gnostic Demiurge in Liber Novus Stephan A. Hoeller
C. G. Jung possessed an intense and sympathetic interest in the early alternative Christian tradition now known as Gnosticism. Both in his published writings and in his private reminiscences one finds frequent and insightful comments about Gnostic tradition, although during much of Jung’s life the subject of Gnosticism was virtually unknown to all but a few scholars of religion.
One of the key documents bearing early testimony to Jung’s vital Gnostic interest was his finely designed book, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos—“Seven Sermons to the Dead.” Jung had the work privately printed in 1916 and over subsequent decades gave copies of it to a select number of friends and associates. With Jung’s approval, H. G. Baynes translated the text of the Sermons into English and this edition was privately printed in 1925. Again, Jung distributed the English edition only to persons whom he felt to be properly prepared for its message.
What remained generally unknown was that around 1917 Jung also transcribed a much-expanded version of the Septem Sermones into the third and final portion of his draft manuscript of Liber Novus, the section entitled “Scrutinies.” There the Sermons appear as the summary revelation of Liber Novus. Jung never publicly revealed the existence of this longer form of the Sermons, and until the publication in 2009 of Liber Novus: The Red Book this version of the Sermons remained entirely inaccessible.
Those who were fortunate enough to become acquainted with Septem Sermones ad Mortuos usually found it intriguing, but they were often somewhat puzzled by its contents. Authorship of the book was attributed not to Jung, but to a historical Gnostic teacher named Basilides. And its place of composition was stated to be “Alexandria, the city where East and West meet.” Over ensuing years, those who had read the book sometimes referred to it as Jung’s Gnostic revelation. But of course, during Jung’s life few people knew much about Gnosticism, nor understood what really made this little book “Gnostic.” Nonetheless, following the publication of Liber Novus, it has become evident that the Sermons are indeed the revelation of C. G. Jung’s Gnostic myth. The Sermons might even be seen as the heart of his New Book—The Red Book: Liber Novus.
Since Jung’s death in 1961, a great deal more information regarding Gnosticism has become available, and it has become a subject of wide popular and academic interest. A major impetus to this awakened attention was the publication in 1977 of the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic scriptures, the most extensive collection of original writings of the ancient Gnostics discovered thus far. The Nag Hammadi texts have shed new light on many details of the Gnostic mythos that were previously obscure. They also help place Jung’s Gnostic tract into a broader context.
The Septem Sermones ad Mortuos has proved over past years to be a difficult book to categorize. Some writers have termed it a “cosmology,” but that remains an inadequate formulation. The document might perhaps more accurately be termed a “psycho-cosmology.” Since Gnostic scriptures typically approached their psycho-spiritual themes in the form of myths, one might propose that the Septem Sermones exemplify the contemporary formulation of a Gnostic myth. Though Jung's text is not identical with any pre-existing Gnostic myth, it is nonetheless related in form to many ancient Gnostic texts that have come to light over the last century.
The Gnostic themes in the Septem Sermones are further amplified by another document created by Jung during the period in which he recorded the Sermons. In early 1916 Jung constructed a detailed and artistically impressive image—or mandala—that diagrammatically represented many of the elements discussed subsequently in the Sermons. He titled it Systema Munditotius, “the system of the entire world.” Jung did not include this image among the many illustrations within his Red Book. Much later in life he did, however, allow it to be published—it appeared in a 1955 issue of the German periodical Du that was dedicated to the Eranos conferences (Jung did not, however, allow his name to be given explicitly as the image’s creator). The illustration was subsequently included as a full-page plate in C. G. Jung: Word and Image. The Systema Munditotius is now reproduced beautifully in The Red Book: Liber Novus, where it appears in Appendix A. The amplified text of the Sermons present in Liber Novus and the diagram of Systema Munditotius together provide a foundation for the following discussion.
Statements substantiating Jung’s affinity with Gnostic tradition run throughout his published writings. Jung held the view that during much of the history of Western culture the reality of the psyche and its role in the transformation of the human being had received scant recognition. In contrast, the Gnostics of old and their later covert progeny—which in Jung’s view included the alchemists and other alternative spiritual movements—affirmed the revelatory importance of the psyche. Jung plainly stated: “For the Gnostics—and this is their real secret—the psyche existed as a source of knowledge.” In response to the recurrent question of whether or not Jung was a Gnostic, one must reply: “Certainly he was, for ‘Gnostic’ means ‘knower,’ and by his own statements Jung was one who knew.” The visions, myths, and metaphors of the Gnostics confirmed Jung’s own experiences recorded in Liber Novus, and this circumstance created a bond that joined him with Gnostics of all ages and places.
Myth of the Demiurge
The myth of the demiurge originated with Plato. In his Timaeus, Plato postulated the existence of a creator deity or “demiurge” who fashioned the material universe. The term demiurge is derived from the Greek word meaning “craftsman.” Although a craftsman and fashioner, it must be understood that the demiurge was not identical with the monotheistic creator figure; the demiurge and the material from which the demiurge fashioned the universe were both secondary consequences of another primary factor. The demiurge is thus an intermediate architect, not a supreme source.
In ancient times, Plato was regarded as the paragon of all wisdom, and his model of a demiurge or cosmic fashioner was further elaborated and adapted within many subsequent schools of thought, including in the myths of the Gnostics. Gnostics envisioned the demiurge as a subordinate supernatural power that was not identical with the true, ultimate, and transcendent godhead. The presence of a myth about this demiurge became a signal characteristic of Gnostic systems. Taking note of the sometimes distasteful character and conduct of the Old Testament deity, Gnostics frequently identified the latter as the demiurge—a being that was not evil, but still of questionable moral stature and limited wisdom.
It has long been apparent to some students of Jung that in Answer to Job he characterized the divine tyrant who tormented Job as a classic Gnostic demiurge. This divinity, as described by Jung, was a being who lacked wisdom due to having lost or forgotten his feminine side—his Sophia (“wisdom”). Notwithstanding this and other evidence, some readers of Jung previously argued that his mythos in the Septem Sermones did not include the controversial Gnostic figure of the demiurge, and therefore it should not be properly called Gnostic. Publication of the Red Book: Liber Novus now makes it abundantly clear that the demiurge is present in Jung’s myth. Indeed, Answer to Job is unmistakably a reformulation of the Gnostic myth disclosed to Jung in Liber Novus and within the Septem Sermones.
Prior to the availability of the expanded version of the Sermons found in Liber Novus, the figure of Abraxas—as portrayed in the published 1916 edition of the Sermons—remained ambiguous. In my book, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, first published in 1982, I offered an initial commentary on the locus of Abraxas in Jung’s myth. With the long-sequestered text of Liber Novus finally available, I now wish to amend and expand those prior comments composed nearly four decades ago. Based on documentation in Liber Novus, the figure Jung identified as “Abraxas” has finally and indisputably been divulged as a classic Gnostic demiurge.
The mysterious being called “Abraxas” first appears in Septem Sermones in the latter part of the Second Sermon; passages describing him continue throughout the Third Sermon and into the Fourth Sermon. Initially, he is there characterized as “a god about whom you know nothing, because men have forgotten him.” This statement can certainly be taken to apply to an intermediate deity, as is ubiquitous in a large number of Gnostic scriptures.
For some two thousand years Western and Middle Eastern cultures have been dominated by the monotheistic god-image familiar to us today. Prior to the first several centuries of the current era, however, many Mediterranean cultures accommodated religions of a pluralistic nature wherein the image of an ultimate, impersonal divine reality coexisted with a number of lesser or intermediate deities. In such ancient pluralistic systems, the image of a materially powerful but morally and spiritually impaired demiurge often played an important role.
Scholars now widely affirm that the incipient Christian religion harbored various alternative forms; those movements in early Christianity that included a myth of the demiurge are usually categorized collectively as “Gnostic.” While the name Abraxas does occur in a few ancient Gnostic texts (where he is usually identified as a great archon), no evidence exists that the demiurge of classical Gnosticism was specifically called Abraxas. Jung’s assignation of the ancient name Abraxas to the demiurge was thus his own imaginative appropriation.
Abraxas and the Demiurge
So, was Abraxas the demiurge in Jung’s myth? Jung’s Black Book journal entry dated January 16, 1916, and reproduced as Appendix C in Liber Novus, removes all question about this issue: Abraxas was the demiurge in Jung’s myth. As Dr. Lance Owens has previously noted, this journal entry—written around the same time Jung sketched the Systema Munidtotius, and about two weeks before he scribed his initial journal version of the Septem Sermones—records the following words spoken to Jung by the Soul, who assumed the voice of the Gnostic Sophia. Her address to Jung is inarguably a rendition of the primal Gnostic myth of the demiurge, here named Abraxas:
You should worship only one God. The other Gods are unimportant. Abraxas is to be feared. Therefore it was a deliverance when he separated himself from me.
Note that the separation of the demiurge from Sophia—“when he separated himself from me”—is a key element of the classic Gnostic myth of Sophia and the Demiurge. She then exhorts,
You do not need to seek him. He will find you, just like Eros. He is the God of the cosmos, extremely powerful and fearful. He is the creative drive, he is form and formation, just as much as matter and force, therefore he is above all the light and dark Gods. He tears away souls and casts them into procreation. He is the creative and created. He is the God who always renews himself in days, in months, in years, in human life, in ages, in peoples, in the living, in heavenly bodies. He compels, he is unsparing. If you worship him, you increase his power over you. Thereby it becomes unbearable. You will have dreadful trouble getting clear of him. … So remember him, do not worship him, but also do not imagine that you can flee him since he is all around you. You must be in the middle of life, surrounded by death on all sides. Stretched out, like one crucified, you hang in him, the fearful, the overpowering.
This journal entry unambiguously identifies the figure of Abraxas, who a few weeks thereafter appeared in Jung’s initial journal version of the Sermons, as the demiurge of classical Gnostic mythology. The identification of Abraxas with the demiurge is further established in the draft manuscript of Liber Novus, where in several passages Jung substituted the term “ruler of this world” for the name “Abraxas” that was originally recorded in his Black Book journal.
At its beginning, Jung’s Gnostic theogony in the Sermons describes an ultimate, utterly transcendental source called the Pleroma, and then a number of intermediate deities, including God-the-Sun, the Devil, Eros, and The Tree of Life. In addition to these figures, the entire Third Sermon is devoted to introducing the demiurgic figure of Abraxas. In the Fourth Sermon Jung summarizes:
Immeasurable, like the host of stars, is the number of gods and devils. Every star is a god, and every space occupied by a star is a devil. And the emptiness of the whole is the Pleroma. The activity of the whole is Abraxas; only the unreal opposes him.
The version of the Sermons included in Liber Novus contains several crucially important additions to the original text that was printed in 1916. In this expanded 1917 manuscript version, Philemon is identified as the speaker presenting the Sermons to the dead (Basilides was the speaker of the Sermons in the printed version). The text incorporates questions that Jung asks Philemon about each sermon, along with Philemon’s answers. Philemon also adds extended homiletic commentary upon the content of his sermons. All of this additional material enriches and further explicates the meaning of the Sermons.
After the First Sermon, Jung’s initial question addressed to Philemon voices concern that the teachings in the Sermons might be regarded as “reprehensible heresy.” (This query bears the characteristic of a rhetorical question.) Philemon replies that the audience to whom the Sermons are addressed—“the dead”—are Christians whose now-abandoned faith long ago declared these teachings to be heresies. This commentary might be interpreted to further imply that a large number of people in our culture are now abandoning their traditional religion and are thus prepared to listen to ancient heresies, wherein they may find answers to their own portentous questions. Philemon’s statement is clear and to the point:
Why do I impart this teaching of the ancients? I teach in this way because their Christian faith once discarded and persecuted precisely this teaching. But they repudiated Christian belief and hence were rejected by that faith. They do not know this and therefore I must teach them…
Philemon’s words are eminently applicable to the problem of religion in contemporary Western culture. Religion in much of Europe has reached an unprecedented low point in its history, and allegiance to the Christian tradition in the U.S.A. appears to be diminishing. Jung frequently pointed out that the god image in a religion and culture is of crucial importance to the well-being of the collective psyche, and therefore also to the well-being of the individual. A major factor inducing the decline of the Christian religion in the West is unquestionably the disappointment people have come to feel with the traditional monotheistic god.
Prophecy of a New Age and a New God Image
Jung’s epochal Liber Novus is, in the consensus view of informed readers, a book of prophecy. On the initial folio of Liber Novus Jung presents an image of a complex landscape surmounted by a zodiac and showing forth the aeonial passage of the sun from the sign of Pisces into that of Aquarius. This image points forward to his title, The Way of What is to Come. The reader then encounters several prophetic quotations from the writings of the prophet Isaiah, and from the prologue to the Gospel of John. Jung’s Liber Novus thus sets the stage for disclosure of its new prophecy.
Throughout both Liber Primus and Liber Secundus of Liber Novus we find recurring references to the coming of the new age of Aquarius. In an impressive section that Jung titled “The Three Prophecies,” his Soul reveals to him three periods in the forthcoming age: War, Magic, and Religion. In commentary on this vision, Jung wrote,
These three mean the unleashing of chaos and its power, just as they also mean the binding of chaos. War is obvious and everybody sees it. Magic is dark and no one sees it. Religion is still to come, but it will become evident. … I felt the burden of the most terrible work of the times ahead. I saw where and how, but no word can grasp it, no will can conquer it. … But I saw it and my memory will not leave me alone.
Examining the numerous prophetic passages in Liber Novus, it becomes clear that at the heart of Jung’s experience there abides a vision of the formation of a new god image. But what indications did Jung give regarding the nature of this new god image and, moreover, how may contemporary persons facilitate the arising of a new god image in their own natures and in the new religion that is to come?
Liber Novus offers several statements that refer to the coming god image. The tone is set in the early part of Liber Primus; Jung there recounts several visions that he experienced which foretold of the time when “the great war broke out between the peoples of Europe.” He then declares,
Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. … The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you?
It is clear from the beginning of Jung’s mysterious prophetic book that the future god image is none other than the divine essential Selfhood indwelling in the human soul. Here, again, we must turn to the expanded version of the Sermons for a clarifying commentary. At the conclusion of the First Sermon, Philemon instructs his audience to strive for what he calls their essences. He continues,
At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely the striving for one's own essence. If you had this striving, you would not need to know anything about the Pleroma and its qualities, and yet you would attain the right goal by virtue of your own essence. Since, however, thought alienates us from our essence, I must teach you that knowledge with which you can bridle your thoughts.
Many Gnostic writings explicitly state that the essence of the human is the fragment of the ultimate reality residing at the center of its being. When it is possible for the human to gain access to this essence, all other religious or spiritual endeavors are redundant. It is largely the fault of the demiurge—or so Jung’s old friends, the Gnostics, believed—that this access is so fraught with difficulty. In the Sermons, Jung’s spirit mentor Philemon offers advice regarding the judicious way in which humans may free themselves from the yoke of the demiurge. Unlike some of the more radical Gnostics of old, Philemon advises us to neither flee from the demiurge Abraxas, nor to seek him. In one passage in the Sermons, Philemon says about Abraxas, “to resist him not is liberation.”
The Gnostic demiurge, by whatever name he may be called, is omnipresent in the outer world. While humans are in terrestrial embodiment they must both accept the demiurge’s presence, and equally endeavor to counterbalance his influence by contacting their own indwelling essence. This indwelling essence is described in the Seventh Sermon as the “solitary star” in the heavens. This statement is supplemented by the revelation Jung recorded in his Black Book journal on January 16, 1916, wherein his Soul admonished him:
You have in you the one God, the wonderfully beautiful and kind, the solitary, starlike, unmoving, he who is older and wiser than the father, he who has a safe hand, who leads you among all the darknesses and death scares of dreadful Abraxas. He gives joy and peace, since he is beyond death and beyond what is subject to change. He is no servant and no friend of Abraxas.
What then is the principal deficiency in the god of the old Aeon, the god who is to be overcome? Employing the nomenclature of the Sermons and other statements by Jung, we might say that the god of the monotheistic religions is a compound in which the ultimate god (called the Pleroma in the Septem Sermones) is unconsciously combined with the demiurge, named by Jung as Abraxas.
Based on the numerous paradoxical and even downright evil deeds and utterances of the Old Testament deity, and the fact that this deity was carried forward into orthodox Christianity, one is tempted to conclude (as Jung did in Answer to Job) that the Judeo-Christian god is at best a being who embodies both arrogance and unconsciousness. It seems quite impossible to believe that this god is both almighty and good—for his goodness would thus have to be combined with impotence, or alternatively, his omnipotence would be joined to his absence of goodness. A considerable portion of humanity has thus reached the point where it can no longer endure the unconscious tension embodied by a blind belief in an utterly enigmatic and derisory god image. This circumstance is causing an unprecedented upsurge of atheism and secularism in Western culture.
Throughout the twentieth century humanity has experienced a multitude of terrible events; these have undermined many people’s ability to have faith in a benevolent god. The medieval brutality of modern-day terrorists motivated by commitment to a monotheistic god has only reinforced the rejection of such traditional god images in secular society. Our age cries out for a new understanding of divinity, and a new god image. This was Jung’s prophesy in Liber Novus. As he also noted, this development may take centuries. Until a new god image constellates, we will pass through an epoch of chaos and violence.
When Christendom cast out the salvific myth of Gnosis in favor of an unimaginative literalism, it became spiritually impoverished. Our impoverishment has now reached its terminus. We await the formation of our new myth—a myth that rediscovers the primordial images and myth of Gnosis. As Jung declared,
I hope the reader will not be offended if my exposition sounds like a Gnostic myth. We are moving in those psychological regions where, as a matter of fact, Gnosis is rooted. The message of the Christian symbol is Gnosis, and the [response to it] by the unconscious is Gnosis in even higher degree. Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes are concerned with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative language.
The Self, the Demiurge, and the New God Image
The issue of the coming god image has captured the attention of several of Jung's students in recent decades. Edward Edinger made perhaps the most complete statement concerning Jung’s declaration in his pioneering book, The New God-Image. As Edinger noted, Jung avowed an ancient and esoteric image of a deific consciousness dwelling in the soul. This affirmation is present in Liber Novus, and is restated in various ways throughout all of Jung’s subsequent writings. In Liber Novus Jung offered a startling prophecy: the long neglected indwelling god image would eventually become the orienting god image of the future. On the first page of Liber Novus he made it plain that this prediction was coordinated with the synchronous passing of the world from the astrological age of Pisces into that of Aquarius.
It is now evident that the essential foundation of Jung’s science and psychological language reposed in his long-concealed Liber Novus. A key revelation present within Liber Novus that later emerged as a core affirmation in his psychology—and as a spiritual and archetypal declaration—was the assertion of the presence within the human psyche of a central archetype, around which other archetypes constellate. He called this central principle or archetype the “Self.” In Psychology and Alchemy—published in 1944, and based on lectures given in 1935—Jung stated:
I have found myself obliged to give [this] archetype the psychological name of the “self”—a term on the one hand definite enough to convey the essence of human wholeness and on the other hand indefinite enough to express the indescribable and indeterminable nature of this wholeness. … Hence in its scientific usage the term “self” refers neither to Christ nor to the Buddha but to the totality of the figures that are its equivalent, and each of these figures is a symbol of the self. This mode of expression is an intellectual necessity in scientific psychology and in no sense denotes a transcendental prejudice. On the contrary … this objective attitude enables one man to decide in favour of the determinant Christ, another in favour of the Buddha, and so on.
While the existence of a divine image internal to the psyche, termed by Jung the “Self,” is widely accepted among followers of Jung, the opposing archetype of the demiurge is far less known. Jung claimed that at the heart of early Christianity there existed the insight of Gnosis; he himself had met this Gnosis in the experiences recorded in his Black Book journals, and thence in Liber Novus and in the Septem Sermones. An essential part of the archetypal mythos of Gnosis is the presence of a duality both inwardly in the soul, and outwardly in the cosmos. This duality is composed of a divine spark within the deepest recesses of the soul, and of an outer demiurgic power. Self and Demiurge stand in opposition.
This symbolic opposition is illustrated clearly in Jung’s 1916 mandala, Systema Munditotius. At the lowest point of the circular mandala, seated on the exterior circle, is a being with the lower body of a large serpent, surmounted by a light-colored torso, and topped by the golden head of a lion crowned with a ten-rayed golden halo. On the opposite pole of the mandala, at the apex of the design, we find a winged egg within which stands the figure of the child-god Phanes. The serpent-lion is described as abraxas dominus mundi (Abraxas, Lord of the World). This powerful demiurge dominates the lower creation, while the child-god Phanes above is about to attain to his full stature. The undifferentiated, primitive god-image is about to be replaced by the still developing child-god of promise.
The Systema Munditotius is further populated by images of archetypal beings that arrange themselves in pairs of opposites on the poles of the mandala. These include deus sol (god the sun) and deus luna satanus (god the moon, Satan). We also find paired a winged rodent identified as scientia (science), and a winged worm named ars (art). Despite the abundance of these symbolic images—many of which later appear as figures in the text of the Septem Sermones—the two principal focal points of the diagram are clearly Abraxas and Phanes.
A picture compensates for many words and Jung’s images here illuminate the nature and role of the archetypes depicted, particularly of the primordial demiurge Abraxas, and of Phanes, the new god-image awaiting birth. Of course, in conjunction with this image, the verbal descriptions of Abraxas in the Septem Sermones are also instructive:
Abraxas is the god whom it is difficult to know. His power is the very greatest, because man does not perceive it at all. He is magnificent even as the lion at the very moment when he strikes his prey down. His beauty is like the beauty of a spring morn.
To see him means blindness; To know him is sickness; To worship him is death; To fear him is wisdom; Not to resist him means liberation … Such is the terrible Abraxas … He is both the radiance and the dark shadow of man. He is deceitful reality.
As Jung noted in the Second Sermon, people know nothing about the demiurge because they have forgotten him. This forgetting was aided by the self-declared architects of the early Christian centuries: the heresiologist Church Fathers of orthodoxy. The very thought of a demiurge thereafter became a heretical abomination to orthodox Christendom. Jung’s insights recorded in the Liber Novus, and particularly in the Sermons, declared that in order to move toward greater wholeness we must look to the coming new god image. But to do this, we need also recognize the forgotten demiurge, the god whom Jung declared “difficult to know.”
Present-day humanity is gradually becoming aware of an inner psychic reality, a centering fact Jung identified as the salvific archetype of the Self. In Liber Novus he prophetically proclaimed that a new god image is developing in humanity—and perhaps a new god image has already awakened in some individuals of our age, as it did in Jung. This incipient aeonial development demands further conscious awareness and a conscious union of the opposites. Using the language of Liber Novus and the Systema Munditotius, we might proclaim that Phanes is now stirring and is about to break out of the egg. For this to happen, however, human beings must also consciously recognize the reality of his opposite entity, the demiurge Abraxas.
Western culture has suffered too long from a ruinous one-sidedness. A powerful element in this one-sided perspective is a militant unwillingness to acknowledge the effective reality of the demiurge. With singular symbolic insight, the ancient Gnostics noted how the human spirit is confined on earth by a prison constructed of perplexing opposites. A demiurgic reality has placed us behind these prison bars, which alternatingly assume form in the inexorable struggle of light and dark, good and evil, or wise and unwise components. Denying the reality of this fact merely continues our confinement.
Our extraverted immersion in the world, both in its natural and cultural aspects, perpetuates servitude to the forgotten Abraxas. His fiery, mesmerizing, and infinitely creative powers enthrall us. We worship the terrible Abraxas in the baleful political ideologies of our epoch. Ever increasingly, he holds us captive in the magically scintillating web of modern technology. Only an increase of psychological awareness, leading to the individuation of our psyches, offers a path to liberation from the domination of the internal complexes and external fascinations that are the essence of Abraxas. It is incumbent upon us to accept the reality of this archetypal force, for in the words of the Sermons, “to worship him is death; to fear him is wisdom, not to resist him means liberation.”
The time has come when we must incorporate Jung’s epochal insights into our lives. The teachings of Liber Novus must be met as a form of spiritual discipline. A few months before his death in 1960, Jung wrote to an acquaintance,
I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole... I have failed in my foremost task: to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.
Today, after the publication of his monumental spiritual classic, Liber Novus, we may be able to finally reply to Jung that he has not failed at all; that inspired now by his visionary message, we too are ready “to give birth to the ancient in a new time.” In some mysterious archetypal locale, the sage Dr. C. G. Jung awaits such a response to his great work.
[Note: Citations and footnotes have been excluded from this internet version. They are available in the published edition.]
The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead
by Stephan A. Hoeller