We will briefly introduce the rediscovered Gnostic texts, examine their historical origins, and discuss Jung’s early encounters with this ancient material. As Jung stated, “The Gnostics were concerned with the problem of archetypes. They made a peculiar philosophy of it, as everybody makes a peculiar philosophy of it when he comes across it naïvely and doesn’t know that the archetypes are structural elements of the unconscious psyche.”
We will engage a psychologically informed consideration of Gnosticism in terms of its primary experiential roots, and then consider how a “hermeneutics of archetypal vision” was foundational to the Gnosis, to Jung’s understanding of Gnostic tradition, and to the roots of his Septem Sermones ad Mortuos.
