The Gnostic Jung: And the Sermons to the Dead (Quest Books) [Paperback]

The seven sermons deal with the self as the androgynous being Abraxas, with the message that self-knowledge may be attained by the conscious assimilation of the contents of the subconscious, in order to achieve unity. The “dead” are those who stopped growing spiritually by not questioning their egos. By not growing, they are in essence the living dead.

Jung considered his own work a link in the golden chain from ancient gnosticism via philosophical alchemy to the modern psychology of the subconscious. Just as in those ancient texts, his work reveals a fragmented self in which the image of the divine may be found.

The author made his own translation of the sermons and provided a comprehensive preface, exegesis of the sermons and afterword in which he comments grippingly on Jung, gnosticism and the current era. His views on the survival of the pansophic/theosophic tradition (through the arts) are particularly enlightening.

Jung’s central doctrine of individuation is an ancient concept of the western esoteric tradition – the tendency of the individual consciousness not to surrender its light into nothingness. Unlike many eastern spiritual systems, the Western tradition never knew the permanent dissolution of the individual consciousness in the divine.

Already in the first sermon this question is discussed, i.e. how to remain an individual while simultaneously achieving an optimal degree of unity with the ineffable greatness of the pleroma within us. Jung gives us an undivided model of reality in which both causal and acausal connections, spirit and matter, are reconciled.

As for belief, Jung convincingly argues that human beings have a religious need - not a need for belief, however, but one for religious experience. This is a psychical experience that leads to the integration of the soul. Inner wholeness – gnosis – is achieved not by belief in ideas, but by experience.

In the place of a god to believe in, Jung thus offers us an existential truth that we can experience. He rejects the “god of belief” in favor of a symbol of lasting validity, and instead of the much abused concept of “belief”, he offers the power of the imagination as the way to gnosis, just as in the magickal and alchemical traditions.

The seven sermons are gripping and poetic, while the commentary is full of insight and enriched by quotes from inter alia the Nag Hammadi texts, Plotinus, Helena Blavatsky, Emerson and others. The most beautiful is a moving poem by the mystic Angelus Silesius, of which I quote a part:

“God is such as he is,
I am what I must be;
If you know one, in truth
You know both him and me.

I am the vine, which he
Doth plant and cherish most;

The fruit which grows from me
Is God, the holy ghost.”

This text, and Basilides’ thoughts on the pleroma (fullness of god), reminded me of Patti Smith’s song “Hymn” on her album Wave:

“When I am troubled in the night
He comes to comfort me
He wills me through the darkness
And the empty child is free

To take his hand, his sacred heart
The heart that breaks the dawn, amen.
And when I think I’ve had my fill
He fills me up again.”

I highly recommend this book as a bridge between psychology and religion, or rather the religious experience in the human psyche. It ought to be read together with William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience” and Richard Maurice Bucke’s “Cosmic Consciousness”, for a breathtaking metaphysical and metatextual experience.