The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead

The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead is a work by Stephan A. Hoeller (1982).

Core claims

• Hoeller’s central achievement is demonstrating that the Seven Sermons to the Dead is not a biographical curiosity but the structural blueprint of Jung’s entire analytical psychology—every major concept from archetypes to individuation to synchronicity exists in embryonic form within this 1916 Gnostic text.
• The book reclaims “Gnostic” as a precise psychological category—not a heresy, not a philosophy, but the designation for anyone whose relationship to the numinous is experiential rather than creedal—thereby dissolving the false dichotomy between Jung-as-scientist and Jung-as-mystic that has distorted reception of his work for decades.
• Hoeller’s reading of Abraxas as the “dynamism of the fullness of being” provides the missing link between Jung’s concept of the Self and the problem of evil, positioning the Seven Sermons as Jung’s earliest and most radical attempt at what he would later formalize in Answer to Job—the insistence that wholeness, not goodness, is the telos of psychic life.

Related questions

• How does Hoeller’s reading of Abraxas as the “dynamism of the fullness of being” compare to Edward Edinger’s treatment of the dark God-image in The New God-Image, and do they converge on the same theological crisis from different directions?
• Hoeller claims Jung’s active imagination is structurally identical to theurgic practice in the Neoplatonic tradition—how does this compare to James Hillman’s critique in Re-Visioning Psychology that Jungian psychology remains too ego-centered in its approach to the imaginal?
• Hoeller argues that the “dead” of the Seven Sermons represent a civilization that has substituted belief for Gnosis—how does this diagnosis relate to Erich Neumann’s account in The Origins and History of Consciousness of the ego’s necessary separation from the unconscious and its eventual return?

See also

• Library page: /library/myth-and-religion/hoeller-gnostic-jung-seven/

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