I found an excellent essay by Stephen Hoeller today, C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Renewal. I linked to it in my previous post where I was talking about how Jungian depth psychology offers some especially useful images for understanding gnostic concepts. The reason this is so, is that Jung studied the works of medieval alchemists at great length. And the medieval alchemists, to some extent, were preserving and encoding earlier systems of gnostic thought, which had been otherwise all but eliminated by the Catholic Church.

Hoeller’s essay has some great things to say about the links between Jung, alchemy and gnosticism.

Jung’s “first love” among esoteric systems was Gnosticism. From the earliest days of his scientific career until the time of his death, his dedication to the subject of Gnosticism was relentless. As early as August, 1912, Jung intimated in a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-toned archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth-psychology. Subsequently, he stated to Barbara Hannah that when he discovered the writings of the ancient Gnostics, “I felt as if I had at last found a circle of friends who understood me.”

Hoeller also points out that most of the work Jung did in this field was done before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945. So his main sources for gnostic thought were unfortunately the early Church fathers who denounced it as heresy. It’s crazy to wonder what Jung would have cooked up had he had access to these texts during the formative years of his research. It’s also interesting though to wonder if Jung’s work actually metaphysically somehow paved the way for these other texts to be unearthed once more.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Jung himself wrote a Gnostic text, which he claims to have channeled from Basilides. It’s called the Seven Sermons to the Dead and may be accessed via Jennifer Emick’s excellent AltReligion.

Anyway, Hoeller also has one of the best quotes I’ve ever seen on the connection of Alchemy & gnosticism, from Prof. Gilles Quispel:

“Alchemy is the Yoga of the Gnostics.”

In other words, it is the “practical” outward discipline of an interior system of knowledge. Quispel is also noteworthy, because he is the historian who is said to have heard about the recently uncovered Nag Hammadi texts, and arranged to illegally buy one of them without the knowledge of the Egyptian authorities, who were trying to control them. He arranged to have it purchased through the Jung Foundation, and that volume subsequently was known as the Jung Codex. I’ve not yet found if Jung himself was involved in this, or whether he wrote on the subject anywhere. If anyone knows, I’d be excited to read more. As far as I can tell, the Jung Codex consisted of what is called The Tripartite Tractate.

Surprisingly, very little seems to be available on what I think is an especially important link between Jung and the gnostics. If this is really a vital link, that means that gnosticism has already had an enormous impact on the modern world, without anyone even realizing it, in the works of C.G. Jung, and all the subsequent psychological exploration and creative development it spawned. So far, I’ve only spotted the following five books on this. If anybody knows of more, I’ll gladly check them out.

1. The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead by Stephen Hoeller
2. The Gnostic Jung by Robert Segal
3. The Allure of Gnosticism: The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture by Robert Segal
4. Jung and the Lost Gospels by Stephen Hoeller
5. The Empty Self: C. G. Jung & the Gnostic Transformation of Modern Identity by Jeffrey Satinover