Carl Jung’s Gnostic Revival, Abraxas, and the 20th Century Cult of Mithra (part 5)

The following is part 5 of an ongoing series. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here and part 4 is here.

Not only did Jung believe himself to be the reincarnation of Emperor Julian the Apostate (a Mithraic initiate who attempted to wipe out Christianity in 364 AD), but as Richard Noll notes in The Jung Cult, the psychologist literally saw himself as a Dionysian messiah and initiate of Mithra who sought to create a new hedonistic religious order.

Speaking to the clash between Roman faiths, Jung stated in his Wandlungen (aka: ‘Psychology of the Unconscious’): “the two great antagonistic religions, Christianity on the one side and Mithraism on the other.”

Situating his preference for Mithraism against Christianity, Jung stated that Mithra worship “is nature worship in the best sense of the word; while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the beauties of this world.”

In a 1925 lecture, Jung describes his own realization of his deification:

“Awe surrounds the mysteries, particularly the mystery of deification. This was one of the most important of the mysteries- it gave certainty of immortality. One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation. The important part that led up to the deification was the snake’s encoiling of me… The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous Deus Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries, the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake’s head resting on the man’s head, and the face of the man that of a lion. This statue has only been found in the mystery grottoes (the underchurches [Mithraeum], the last remnants of the catacombs).” [Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 98]

Jung scholar Richard Noll noted the occult psychiatrist’s fixation with Mithra in the following section of ‘The Jung Cult- Origins of a Charismatic Movement’: “When Jung became one with Aion in his visionary initiation experience, in his imagination he was not only becoming a full participant in the mysteries of Mithras; he was experiencing a direct initiation into the most ancient of the mysteries of his Aryan ancestors.”

The Deus Leontocephalus described by Carl Jung is at the heart of the Mithra Cult, and featured a demonic figure dubbed Ariamanus (or “Ahriman” in the Zoroastrian system). The figure features lion’s head on a winged naked man’s body wrapped in a serpent, and often encircled by a zodiac. Hundreds of such statues have been recovered from Mithraic temples and according to archaeologist Franz Cumont, denotes the Mithraic Chronos as a god of wasting eternity characterized by death, evil and decay (in opposition to Kairos, the transcendental time beyond Chronos).

Caption: Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626–1679), Saturn Devouring his Children (c 1660). Wikimedia Commons.

In Rome Chronos became the god Saturn, who we noted in part three and part four, sits at the seventh and last rite of initiation of Mithraic mysteries before tapping into their true God-self. In this egotistical perversion of divinity, the new “self” of the initiated has come to learn that the God of the Bible which promotes good and condemns evil, is actually an evil demiurge, while the true God beyond this demiurge, in whose image the initiate is made, is an amoral, and multi-sexual God, beyond good or evil.

This is why it is so important for oligarchists to ensure that society’s only definition of “reason” is bounded by strict the limitations of linear reductionist logic (typically some mixture of deductive/inductive logic). The suffocating constraints which this fallacious notion of “reason” imposes onto the mind, and the associated Kantian corrolaries in the moral domain (of “forcing” good behaviour as categorical imperatives at best) results in a tyranny of reason from which victims of said conditioning must desire to free themselves.

This liberation from false rigid reason via occultism and gnosis is a powerful recipe for Luciferianism.

Writing to Giuseppe Mazzini, Grandmaster Albert Pike laid out this logic in some detail writing: “The Masonic religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian Doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonay (the God of the Christians) whose deeds prove his cruelty, perfidy and hatred of man, barbarism and repulsion to science, would Adonay and his priests calumniate him? Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also God. For the eternal law is that there is no light without shade, no beauty without ugliness, no white without black, for the absolute can only exist as two Gods…the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay.”

It is important to here recall that Lucifer is yet another analog for solar deities Horus, Marduk, Apollo and of course… Mithra.

Nag Hamadi Gnostic Gospel

Today, intensive efforts are being made to revive the Cults of Cybele/Demeter as well as cult’s Christian gnostic synthetic cults (outlined in the Nag Hamadi texts) in the works of Elaine Pagels, Brian Muraresku, Diana Pasulka, Graham Hancock and countless others.

The connection from the early Christian gnostic scriptures and broader occult mystery religions spread out across the ancient world is direct, and for at least several hundred years was managed by the neo-Platonic gnostics that had taken over Plato’s academy like a virus after the 2nd century BC.

These neo-Platonists which usurped the name of Plato used the following formula: 1) extract anything touching on mythological text from Plato’s dialogues without any context, 2) formalize Plato’s concepts of the two realities (Being and Becomming/finiteness and infiniteness/ temporal and eternal) into crystalized definitions devoid of transformative change, and 3) eliminate the notion of universal reason from its association with moral virtue as taught by Plato and all true Platonists.

Within this set of fallacies, “knowledge” became something reserved only for an inner elite that had detached themselves from the corrupt influence of reason through carefully arranged rites of initiation.

Writing in How Jesus and his Followers Saved Civilization (1980), historian Robert Carmen Dreyfuss writes that:

“The Isis Cult and its sister cults [Magna Mater-Cybele/Attis, Mithra etc] were determined to destroy Christianity from the inside. Gnosticism, by adopting the protective coloration of being a quasi- or pseudo- Christian sect, used that capability to try to introduce the ancient belief structure of the cults back into the Christian movement.”

Among the themes of the gnostic gospels include 1) a sexualization of God into a bisexual being in who’s image all initiates are made, 2) the elimination of the divinity of Christ, 3) the re-branding of the Biblical God as an evil demiurge, 4) the glorification of secret mysteries only accessible through the abandonment of reasoning powers, and in some cases, 5) redemption through sexual frenzy, and hallucinogenic beverages.

Across the multitude of variations of gnostic “sacred stories”, we find the existence of sexualized spirit entities called ‘aeons’ that were created by an entity of pure light and emptiness not dissimilar to the zen Buddhist ideal of “Being” as “Not-Being”.

After multiple breedings, these aeon entities became more numerous, and by virue of their seperation in “time” from the source Being, they became more impure resulting in the youngest aeon dubbed ‘Pistis Sophia’ (and sometimes ‘Gaia’) who became infested with ignorance and despised masculine energy so much that she procreated with herself creating an abomination.

As the story goes, this abortive child became a sociopathic and self-delusional multi-sex demiurge named ‘Yaldabaoth’, commonly expressed as a snake with lion’s head. Typically, the imagery of Yaldabaoth is conveyed with a sun and moon flanking the monstrocity indicating rituals of ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’ (or Apollonian/Dionysian-Bachanalian types) affiliated with ceremonies of worshippers of the mysteries.

This sociopathic demiurge infused darkness with light creating a new force of evil to counterbalance the good and with this evil force, dubbed himself ‘the one and only God’ who created the universe in seven days.

This evil demiurge took on the names ‘Yaldabaoth’, ‘Samael, and Saklas’, and throughout gnostic sects is referred to as ‘Great Archon’ (by Valentinus), ‘Chief Archon’ (by the Apocryphon of John), ‘Great Demiurge’ (by Basilides), or Satan (in the Gnostic Gospel of Nicodemus), and is found throughout the gnostic scriptures as the ignorant and purely evil God of the Bible, that made the world in his/her image.

In the gnostic Sethian treatise called ‘The Nature of the Rulers’, we find the evil demiurge saying: “I am God; there is no other but me”. When he said this, he sinned against [the Realm of All]. This boast rose up to Incorruptibility and a voice answered from Incorruptibility and said “You are wrong, Samael”- which means “blind god”… His thoughts were blind. He expressed his power- that is, the blasphemy he had uttered- and pursued it down to chaos and his mother the abyss, at the instigation of Pistis Sophia". She established each of his offspring according to its power, after the pattern of the eternal realms above. For the visible originated from the invisible.”

Describing the break of the souls of Yaldabaoth and his corrupt co-creating Archons, from the realm of spirits which are incorruptible beings of light, the author of the Sethian text states: “Her [Sophia’s] image appeared as a reflection in the waters, and the authorities [demiurge and top Archons] of darkness fell in love with her. But they could not grasp the image that appeared to them in the waters [since]… what is only soul cannot grasp what is of spirit. For the authorities [see archons-creator beings of material world and the realm of reason] were from below, but the image of Incorruptibility was from above.”

Within this gnostic cosmology, the figure of Christ becomes an aeon/archon who delivered the secret mysteries to mankind through the figure of the serpent in the Garden. The figure of Yaldabaoth was so enraged by this heresy that he fooled the world into thinking that the serpent, or Lucifer was evil, but in truth was always the path to light.[1]  

In the Gospel of Seth (which at various times is the name for Noah’s supposed third son and also the snake of the garden), a ritual is even promoted for anyone wishing to “know” the heavens… simply cut out a womb from a living pregnant woman:

“Heaven and earth have a shape similar to the womb… and if… anyone wants to investigate this, let him carefully examine the pregnant womb of any living creature, and he will discover an image of the heavens and the earth.”

Whether or not this was in the minds of the satanic murder of Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife at the hands of the Scientology-connected Manson family is a question that has not been addressed by any known researcher in this author’s opinion.

In another gospel found among the Nag Hamadi scriptures in Egypt in 1947, we have the Trimophic Protennoia speaking as the voice of God saying: “I am the Voice… [it is] I who speak within every creature… Now I have come a second time in the likeness of a female, and have spoken with them… I have revealed myself in the Thought of the likeness of my masculinity.” The “voice” goes on to explain: “I am androgynous. [I am both Mother] and Father, since I copulate with myself… [and with those] who love me… I am the Womb [that gives shape] to the All… I am Meirothea, the glory of the Mother.“

In the gnostic gospel ‘Thunder, Perfect Mind’ we hear the same voice go even further saying:

“I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore, and the holy one. I am the wife, and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter… I am knowledge and ignorance… I am shameless; I am ashamed. I am strength and I am fear… I am foolish and I am wise… I am godless and I am one whose God is great.”

The theme which all of the aforementioned adopt is the notion that the “pure Christianity” was found in the pre-Nicene gnostic mystery cults- which in truth were nothing more than pseudo-Mithraic/Cybele/Demeter sects having adopted a mere Christian veneer.

The psychiatrist who ran the CIA’s MK Ultra’s Psylocibin Project at Harvard carrying out psychological experiments on students using psychedelic drugs, was none other than Henry Murray, a disciple of Carl Jung for many years. CIA director Allen Dulles who initiated and oversaw the MK Ultra with its 1953 launch worked closely with Jung throughout World War II, and the Cold War.

Carl Jung: Gnostic High Priest

In a 1912 letter to Freud, Carl Jung had himself described this revival of the gnostic mysteries as a replacement for Christianity saying:

 “I think we must give it [referring to his new religion] time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were- a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal.” [McGuire, Freud-Jung Letters p. 294- letter 178J]

Jung was extremely clear that his devotion to the Mithraic secret doctrines of gnostic Christianity which he saw as the basis of a new global religion.

In The Gnostic Jung, theosophist Stephan A. Hoeller writes: “In ancient Gnosticism we find very clear statements of a spiritual libertarianism… which regards the individual human pneuma as superior to and possessing a sovereignty over the primitive law of "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not" promulgated by the demiurge [the God of the Bible]. To imagine that one's pure, divine spirit could be even affected, and even less lost because of transgressing against the petty laws of a cosmic tyrant appeared laughable to the Gnostics.”

The true actualized self, integrated with the subconscious shadows, was for Jung, liberated from all moral considerations, and like Crowley (or the Hellfire Club’s Francis Dashwood earlier) knew that “Do What Thou Whilst” was the whole of the Law.

Hoeller writes: “Like a true Gnostic, Carl Jung recognized that, even at best, goodness is no substitute for wholeness; he frequently said that in the long run what matters is not goodness or obedience to moral laws, but only and simply the fullness of being.”

Cynthia Chung, in her recent essay ‘The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and The Land of the Dead – Descending into the Underworld PART VI’ elegantly demonstrates the neo-pagan revival underlying Jung’s entire adult life:

(Sidenote: Carl Jung and the Land of the Dead is included as parts 5-7 in Cynthia’s upcoming book ‘The Shaping of a World Religion’)

Jung’s 7 Sermons to the Dead

Jung’s devotion to Christian gnosticism was demonstrated as early as 1916, when he channelled the 2nd century gnostic priest of Alexandria named Basilides in his now famous ‘Seven Sermons to the Dead’. In these sermons, Jung delivered seven gnostic sermons to the spirits of dead knights Templar saying “The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching.”

Jung tells the ghosts the story of creation and the fundamental essence of everything which he describes as ‘Pleroma’ saying: “I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities… This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma.”

This fundamental nothingness which Jung describes as the essential purity of all to which all must desire to return is both All and nothing, and also both good and evil, and every other opposite saying: “The qualities [of Pleroma] are pairs of opposites, such as: The Effective and the Ineffective, Fullness and Emptiness, Living and Dead, Difference and Sameness, Light and Darkness, The Hot and the Cold, Force and Matter, Time and Space, Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness, The One and the Many. etc.”

Throughout the seven sermons, Basilides (aka: Jung) declares the figure of Abraxas to be the whole integrated man which unites all opposites of good and evil saying: “What the god-sun speaketh is life. What the devil speaketh is death. But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time. Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.”

Once actualizing Abraxas, Jung explains that man becomes “the creator and the destroyer of his own world.”

Caption: A print from Bernard de Montfaucon's L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (Band 2,2 page 358) with different images of Abraxas. The deity appeared in diverse forms outlined above, but was often portrayed as a human body with snake legs, a rooster head and usually holding a whip and shield.

More on this topic will be described in a future study on Jung’s Seven Sermons, but it suffices to say for the moment that Abraxas represents a pure recipe for driving a mind into insanity, fragmentation and echoes the type of thinking expressed by Lord Bertrand Russell who later called for a scientific dictatorship capable of convincing students that “snow is black”. [2]

The earlier meditations of Ignatius Loyola who also sought to train Jesuit adepts believe that white is black also reflects this gnostic technique [3].

For those who have read parts one, three and four of this series, the connection between Mithra to the Jesuits should make this concept stand out as extremely important.

Jung’s Role in Reviving the Gnostic Gospels

In fact, the first compilation of gnostic texts discovered in Egyptian caves in 1945 were illegally purchased by the Jung Institute in 1953, and were dubbed the Jung Codex which Jung’s biographer Stephen Hoeller stated: “Jung's influence is almost solely responsible for the vital project of the publication of the greatest storehouse of original Gnostic writings ever discovered in history, the Nag Hammadi Library.” [from The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1983.]

Hoeller describes at length how Jung worked with his friend Dr. Gilles Quispel closely as the later translated and published the books under the banner of “the Jung Codex”. Hoeller writes: “This codex, named Jung Codex was presented to the Jung Institute in Zurich on the occasion of the eightieth birthday of Dr. Jung, and was thus the first item from the Nag Hammadi find to be openly viewed by scholars and laymen outside the turbulent and uncooperative milieu of Egypt in the fifties. Professor Quispel himself went on record as stating that Jung was instrumental in calling attention to, and in publishing, the priceless collection of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.”

Carl Jung was not only the overseer of the gnostic revivalism through his acquisition and promotion of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, but was also a promoter of psychedelics evidenced by a 1955 lecture which begins with the guru saying he didn’t know the difference between LSD or mescalin. Within 10 minutes, Jung’s disingenuous nature came through when he said to his students: “I can only hope that the doctors will feed themselves thoroughly with mescalin, the alkaloid of divine grace, so that they learn for themselves its marvellous effect.”

Carl Jung soon took charge of the Eranos Conferences in Ascona, Switzerland in 1933, which had been set up by a nest of theosophists and Fabians with the mandate of creating a new spiritualism based on a synthesis of modern psychology, religion, philosophy and the occult.

The Eranos Conferences would inspire two followers of Aldous Huxley named Richard Price and Michael Murphy to create a new organization in America, called ‘The Esalen Institute’ in Big Sur California in 1962.

Jung’s intention to overthrow Christianity, establish a new gnostic religious order based on drugs, embrace of the shadow, and liberation from morality (with him as a high priest) was shared by fellow Ascona participant Aldous Huxley- MK Ultra guiding light, author of Doors of Perception, and Brave New World.

Describing his conversation with Aldous Huxley, LSD guru, and Esalen member Timothy Leary wrote in his autobiography:

“We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.”

In a future essay, we will review the Esalen Institute’s role in reviving the Cult of Mithra, Cybele-Attis, the Eleusinian Mysteries under a new global priesthood.

To really wrap your mind more deeply around the role and systemic “new insanity” behind the new age spiritualism that was spearheaded by Jung, follow Cynthia’s new series which is being written in tandem with my current series (and both playing into the emerging ‘Hidden Hand Behind UFOs’ film series. Her latest pieces which are building up to Esalen and a New World Religion from a different orbital pathway can be found here:

The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and The Land of the Dead PART V

The Shaping of a World Religion: Carl Jung and The Land of the Dead – Descending into the Underworld PART VI

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Footnote

[1] From the Theosophical Review, Volume 6, Blavatsky writes “Ildabaoth or Ialdabaoth is identical with the Fetahil of the Codex Nazaraeus, the Demiurge of the Valentinian system (Lucifer, vi, 33), the Proarchos of the Barbelitae (Irenaeus, I, xxix, 4), the Great Archon of Basilides and the Elohim of Justinus, &c. Ildabaoth (the Child of Chaos) was the son of Sophia (Achamoth) in Gnostic Cosmogenesis, in other words, the Chief of the Creative Forces and the representative of one of the classes of Pitris. If we regard the Sophia-Above (Lucifer, vi, 33, pp. 231, et seqq.) as the Akdsa, and the Sophia-Below (Achamoth) as its lower or material planes, we shall be able to understand why Ildabaoth, the material creator, was identified with Jehovah and Saturn, and so follow out the following allegory from Irenaeus (I, xxiii-xxviii). Ildabaoth the child of the Mother, Sophia, generates a son of himself, without the assistance of any mother, and his son a son in his turn, and he another, and so on until there are six sons generated, one from another. Now these immediately commenced to strive with their father for the mastery; and he in despair and rage gazed into the “purgations of matter” below; and through them begot another son, Ophiomorphos, the serpent-formed, the spirit of all that is basest in matter.”

[2] In the Impact of Science on Society, Russell stated: “Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will fay different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: First, that the influence of the home is obstructive; second, not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before age ten; third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective; fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate it is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey. ”

[3] “Thirteenth Rule. To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it”

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