Creation occupies a position of singular generative importance within the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmological event, psychological process, and mythological archetype. Marie-Louise von Franz, whose monograph on the subject remains the canonical Jungian treatment, reads creation myths as projections of the psyche’s own originary dynamics: the movement from undifferentiated unconscious totality toward consciousness mirrors the primordial separation of elements described in myths worldwide. For von Franz, creation is never merely cosmological history but an ongoing psychic event, retold by the unconscious whenever consciousness itself is threatened with dissolution. Jung, in the Sermones of the Red Book, identifies creation with differentiation itself — to create is to distinguish, and differentiation is the very essence of creaturely existence. Henry Corbin, drawing on Ibn ʿArabī, displaces the Western notion of creatio ex nihilo entirely, proposing instead that creation is perpetual theophany — the continuous self-manifestation of divine being through imaginative forms. Edinger frames creation as the psyche’s central myth for modernity: consciousness emerging from the unconscious is the creation story secular humanity must own. Alchemical sources, mediated through Abraham and Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, cast God’s creation as an alchemical operation whose pattern the Great Work replicates. Across all these registers the tension is constant: between order and chaos, separation and union, the one and the many.
Creation as the ‘rule of being’ is the pre-eternal and continuous movement by which being is manifested at every instant in a new cloak.
Corbin presents Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine of perpetual renewal (khalq jadīd) as the definitive refutation of creatio ex nihilo, reconceiving creation as the continuous theophanic self-disclosure of hidden Divine Being in successive creaturely forms.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
the initial idea of Ibn ʿArabī’s mystic theosophy and of all related theosophies is that the Creation is essentially a theophany (tajallī). As such, creation is an act of the divine imaginative power.
Corbin argues that authentic theosophical metaphysics grounds creation not in a once-for-all divine decree but in the ontologically creative divine Imagination, making every theophanic manifestation an act of creation.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
Differentiation is creation. It is differentiated. Differentiation is its essence, and therefore it differentiates. Therefore man differentiates, since his essence is differentiation.
Jung, in the voice of the Sermones, identifies creation ontologically with differentiation itself, asserting that creaturely existence is constituted by the act of distinguishing qualities within the undifferentiated Pleroma.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
the unconscious retells parts of the creation myth to restore conscious life and the conscious awareness of reality again.
Von Franz establishes the functional thesis of her study: creation myths are not historical cosmologies but psychic documents that the unconscious deploys to reconstitute threatened consciousness, making individuation analogous to cosmogony.
, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
human consciousness is not of our own doing, rather nature and the history of our own evolution have driven us to attain this consciousness) was indeed a catastrophe. Then it would have been proved that the creation of man, mainly of conscious man, was a c
Von Franz confronts the darkest implication of the creation-as-consciousness thesis: that nature’s production of reflective human awareness may constitute a catastrophic experiment, given humanity’s capacity for planetary destruction.
, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
Creation is a sudden autonomous event which, from a psychological angle, we could say takes place in the collective unconscious for no outer reason.
Von Franz characterizes cosmogonic creation as structurally analogous to the autonomous irruption of symbolic content from the collective unconscious — an event without external causation.
, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
The first act of creation is therefore the separation of this divine couple, pushing them sufficiently apart so that a space is created for the rest of creation.
Edinger reads the World Parents’ separation as the paradigmatic alchemical separatio and the ur-act of creation, establishing that differentiation of primordial opposites is the psychic prerequisite for any further development.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
whenever the emphasis lies on creative action, on creative activity, you can just as well have three or six or nine. There are, one could say, triadic groupings of creative potencies.
Von Franz maps numerical symbolism onto creative dynamics, arguing that triadic structures in cosmogonic myth encode the flowing, processual character of creative action, while quaternary structures encode the resulting stabilized order.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
The alchemists not only viewed their creation as a duplication of God’s creation, but they also perceived God’s creation as an alchemical process, describing it as a divine chemical separation in the krater of the universe.
Abraham documents how alchemical tradition collapsed the distinction between divine cosmogony and laboratory practice, treating the creation of the philosopher’s stone as a literal recapitulation of God’s original creative act.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
It is only when a continual creative broadening of consciousness takes place by degrees within the
Von Franz links the mythic theme of catastrophic creation — exemplified by fallen angels producing giants — to the psychological hazard of premature expansions of consciousness, insisting that genuine creativity requires gradual integration.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
As soon as the image of the egg comes up, it is associated with the idea of concentration: tapas, brooding, and the birth of intelligence.
Von Franz interprets the cosmic egg motif as a symbol of the self in its pre-realized potentiality, linking cosmogonic incubation to the psychic prerequisite of concentrated self-reflection before conscious individuation can begin.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
something which constantly breaks the consolidation of collective consciousness and thus keeps the door open for the influx of new creative contents.
Von Franz interprets the trickster figure as a structural necessity within creation dynamics, his disruptive function preserving the psychic openness through which genuinely new creative contents can emerge.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
There was only Naareau sitting in the Void. Long he sat, and there was only he. Then Naareau said in his heart, ‘I will make a woman.’
Von Franz presents this Kiribati cosmogony as a paradigm of creation from pure interiority — will and thought generating form out of absolute void — illustrating the psychological archetype of creation emerging from the depths of the self.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
all the creation myths which attribute the origin of the world to the sexual union of father and mother very quickly skip over the beginning and go on to the next step. It is therefore a way of explaining creation when, for one reason or another, one does not want to go deeper into the question.
Von Franz critiques hieros gamos cosmogonies as psychologically evasive, arguing that explaining creation by the conjunction of opposites merely substitutes one mystery for another without confronting the ultimate origins of being.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
the passive, the dreamy one, the one who does not enter into creation, is, so to speak, the High God who retires into heaven, and the active one is sometimes the more destructive, Luciferian tendency who breaks away from a harmonious preconscious totality.
Von Franz challenges Western evaluations of creative activity, noting that many mythologies privilege the withdrawn High God over the active creator-demiurge, implicating entry into creation itself as a Luciferian rupture from primordial wholeness.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
Thus the first quarrel arose.
Von Franz reads the twin-creator conflict motif as a mythological encoding of the first differentiation within an originally unified psychic pleroma, equating the birth of opposition with the origin of creation itself.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
The act of foundation at the same time repeats the cosmogonic act, for to ‘secure’ the snake’s head, to drive the peg into it, is to imitate the primordial gesture of Soma.
Drawing on Eliade, von Franz shows that creation myths function ritually as well as psychologically — every act of foundation recapitulates the cosmogonic event, affirming that creation is not a past event but a perpetually repeated psychic act.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
This concept was always retained, with a few exceptions, by the Christians … It contradicted philosophical cosmology of the traditional type, in which reason was primarily regarded as the animating and structuring factor in the universe, creation being mainly considered an act of organizing, shaping, and vivifying.
Dihle traces the philosophical conflict between the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and the Greco-philosophical model of creation as rational ordering of pre-existing matter, a tension that reverberates through Gnostic and depth-psychological treatments of the theme.
, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
Wisdom, one might say, is the face that God turns towards his Creation, and the face that Creation, in humankind, turns towards God.
Louth expounds Bulgakov’s sophiological doctrine that creation is constitutively related to God through uncreated Wisdom, such that creation is inherently graced and the human person is the locus where creation returns its gaze to its source.
, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentsupporting
To speak about creation is to speak about the cosmos that God created to be deified: we have noted earlier how Orthodox theologians think of the great arc of the divine economy as stretching from creation to deification.
Louth presents Stăniloae’s Orthodox theology of creation as teleologically oriented toward deification, framing creation not as a self-contained act but as the opening movement of an arc that finds its completion in union with God.
, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentsupporting
He, the never-aging, the always Jung, male-female, embracing the cosmos, but unembraced by it, lives with his Ennoia, a female power, within him.
Von Franz analyses the Gnostic Father-Self whose inner feminine principle, Ennoia (pre-verbal thought), initiates creation through desire for union, positioning the feminine as the dynamic impulse that breaks primordial stasis into creative differentiation.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
Yaldabaoth organized everything after the pattern of the first realms that had come into being, so that he might create everything in an incorruptible form.
Meyer’s Gnostic text presents demiurgic creation as an imitation of higher, incorruptible archetypes — a shadow-cosmogony that depth psychology reads as the ego’s attempted replication of archetypal patterns it cannot fully access.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting
Then those three create the world together. Here there are really three, but in the beginning before Earth Initiate comes down to start the creative process, two Gods drift on a raft over the water.
Von Franz documents triadic cosmogonic structures across diverse traditions, supporting her thesis that the number three encodes the dynamic, processual nature of creation as opposed to the static orientation signified by quaternary forms.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
The God Tangaloa lived in the far spaces. He created all things. He was alone, there was no heaven, no earth. He was alone and wandered about in space.
Von Franz presents the Samoan cosmogony as an instance of the solitary-god type, illustrating how creation from absolute aloneness projects the psyche’s encounter with its own undifferentiated ground.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
certain artists even cultivate this form of creation where spots, holes, and objects found by accident at a certain moment are fitted into the picture. They try to get close to the creative process by picking up those accidental things which offer themselves.
Von Franz draws an analogy between the accidental interventions of the unconscious in artistic practice and the mythic motif of creation-by-chance, suggesting that genuine creativity involves surrendering intentional control to autonomous unconscious process.
, Creation Myths, 1995aside
You will understand what Moses has written concerning the creation; you will see what manner of body Adam and Eve had before and after the Fall.
Jung cites an alchemical text that promises esoteric comprehension of the Genesis creation narrative as the fruit of the Work, linking alchemical transformation to a recovered understanding of humanity’s pre-lapsarian, archetypal nature.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944aside