Pneumatikoi

The pneumatikoi — the spiritual ones — are, in Gnostic and especially Valentinian taxonomy, the bearers of the pneumatic spark: those in whom an element of the divine pneuma is present and recoverable. Jung records the Bousset summary: “The Gnostics believed that human beings, or at any rate some human beings, carry within them from the beginning a higher element (the Image) deriving from the world of light, which enables them to rise above the world of the Seven into the upper world of light” (Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, p. 321, cited in Jung 1955, Mysterium Coniunctionis, n. 55). Irenaeus reports the parallel: “The pneumatikoi have in them a little bit of the Pleroma” (Irenaeus, Adv. haer. II.19, cited in Jung 1955, n. 57).

For Jung the pneumatikoi are the Gnostic name for what depth psychology recovers as the spirit-archetype and the Self: an autonomous content of the unconscious which the tradition has experienced as a higher, light-bearing principle that the ego does not produce and cannot fully possess. The Gnostic taxonomy ranks human beings by the activation of this pneumatic element; the depth tradition, refusing the elitism, reads the activation as individuation available in principle to anyone.

The atom is included because the Gnostic pneumatikoi form one of the chief historical channels through which the word pneuma carried its specifically psychological — not merely physiological or cosmological — sense forward into the Christian and Hermetic centuries.

Relationships

• pneuma
• gnosis-hermetic
• nous
• corpus-hermeticum
• carl-jung

Primary sources

• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955, notes 55, 57)