27: CARL JUNG • Seven Sermons to the Dead (Part 1)

In 1916, the world renowned psychologist, Dr. Carl Gustave Jung experienced something strange and supernatural, something which he wouldn’t publicly speak about, for fear of ridicule, until the last year of his life. It was an unexplainable phenomenon which resulted in an explosion of creativity in Dr. Jung, culminating in the writing of the last chapter of his notorious Red Book. This last chapter contains a section that is distinct and extraordinary enough that it warrants its own separate title. Jung named it: Seven Sermons to the Dead. It is the only portion of The Red Book that Jung himself published and shared with his closest colleagues during his lifetime. The rest of The Red Book stayed a secret, locked in a vault, for fifty years after his death.

And so, we can surmise that this final chapter held some great significance to Jung, some essence or spirit of the whole magnum opus. That from the hundreds of pages we have of The Red Book, he chose this small section to share.

That same question has mystified Jungian enthusiasts for the last century. The Seven Sermons to the Dead is dense with esoteric concepts and mythopoetic imagery. It’s incredibly fascinating.

But I must warn you, this is the opposite of casual reading. Skimming the words or reading the WikiPedia page simply just won’t do. And so, we will tackle it piece by piece, with the full respect and intellectual rigor it deserves.

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In the last year of his life, Dr. Jung stayed resolute that this work of The Red Book and the Seven Sermons formed the nucleus which all of his following life’s work was rooted in. In the book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections he says:

“Today I can say that I have never lost touch with my initial experiences. All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.”

On this episode of Creative Codex, we will come to understand what happened to Jung in 1916, the rippling effect it had on his life and work, and we will attempt to understand it not through an interpretive lens, but through Jung’s own experiences. Taking into account everything he knew that informed it and everything that it represented to him about the human mind.

As you can imagine…we have our work cut out for us.

This is Creative Codex, I am your host MJDorian. Welcome to episode 27, Carl Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead [bell]

Let’s begin.

[main theme]

Chapter One: Calling Up The Dead

In the last years of his life, Carl Jung sat down with author, colleague, and fellow analyst, Aniela Jaffe, with the aim to record his life story in written form. That book came to be known as Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and it was first published in 1961, the same year as Jung’s death.

It’s in this book that Jung has left us little breadcrumb trails concerning pivotal moments in his life. It’s in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that Jung recounts his key childhood memories, his education, his contentious split with Freud, and the startling dreams and visions which often changed the course of his life. For example: this is where we find Jung’s written account of his River of Blood vision, of 1913, which occurs during a near mental breakdown, a vision that serves as the catalyst for his writing The Red Book.

We have already explored that vision and the contents of The Red Book in great detail in episodes 11 and 12 of this podcast. If you have not yet listened to those, I highly recommend pausing this episode and scrolling down in the podcast feed to episode 11: Carl Jung • The Red Book Part 1. It will give you a strong foundation and a context for what’s to come.

As we shall see, ‘Seven Sermons to the Dead’ serves as a culmination of the work of The Red Book.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung invites us into his inner world during this turbulent visionary time between 1913 and 1916. He is remarkably honest, stating:

“Particularly at this time, when I was working on the fantasies, I needed a point of support in ‘this world,’ and I may say that my family and my professional work were that to me. It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world…

The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma from a Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht—these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling about in the winds of the spirit… Thus my family and my profession always remained a joyful reality and a guarantee that I also had a normal existence.”

It’s important to remember this. That despite all of these strange and deeply profound experiences that Jung intentionally engages—often in his nightly hours—that he is still firmly rooted in the material world, in the daytime. He has responsibilities that require him to remain functional, and that in many ways, it is the existence of those responsibilities that helps him to remain grounded. This is an important thing to remember, for anyone who is interested in exploring this type of ‘inner work’ in their own life. It’s something that many people who venture into esoteric traditions and meditation practices also wrestle with. When you genuinely begin to engage with your inner world, you may realize “Hey, it’s pretty interesting in there.” In some ways, it may seem even more interesting than the exterior world.

As an example, if we look at the ancient Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, we see that for centuries there was an age restriction. It was required that a person must reach the age of 40 before they were allowed to begin practicing. Part of the functional reasoning for such a restriction could be exactly what we’re talking about. There can be a danger of foregoing real world engagement, and turning inward—entirely. But by the age of 40, it would be assumed that you would have a family and responsibilities that anchor you in reality.

And that’s what Jung seems to be expressing here.

He goes on to describe the ominous circumstances that compelled him to write the final chapter of The Red Book. He states:

[cue music]

“Very gradually the outlines of an inner change began making their appearance within me.

In 1916 I felt an urge to give shape to something. I was compelled from within, as it were, to formulate and express what might have been said by Philemon. This was how the Seven Sermons to the Dead with its peculiar language came into being.

It began with a restlessness, but I did not know what it meant or what “they” wanted of me.

There was an ominous atmosphere all around me. I had the strange feeling that the air was filled with ghostly entities. Then it was as if my house began to be haunted. My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away; and that same night my nine-year-old son had an anxiety dream. In the morning he asked his mother for crayons, and he, who ordinarily never drew, now made a picture of his dream.

He called it “The Picture of the Fisherman.” Through the middle of the picture ran a river, and a fisherman with a rod was standing on the shore. He had caught a fish. On the fisherman’s head was a chimney from which flames were leaping and smoke rising. From the other side of the river the devil came flying through the air. He was cursing because his fish had been stolen. But above the fisherman hovered an angel who said, “You cannot do anything to him; he only catches the bad fish!” My son drew this picture on a Saturday.

Around five o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another. The atmosphere was thick, believe me!

Then I knew that something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.”

That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones.

Then it began to flow out of me, and in the course of three evenings the thing was written. As soon as I took up the pen, the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.

The experience has to be taken for what it was, or as it seems to have been. No doubt it was connected with the state of emotion I was in at the time, and which was favorable to parapsychological phenomena. It was an unconscious constellation whose peculiar atmosphere I recognized as the numen of an archetype. “It walks abroad, it’s in the air!”[10] The intellect, of course, would like to arrogate to itself some scientific, physical knowledge of the affair, or, preferably, to write the whole thing off as a violation of the rules.

But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!”

[end music]

It’s an incredible account. Jung paints a vivid picture for us that really captures this whirlwind of energy, the synchronicities piling up, the tense atmosphere of the house, the strange dreams and even the uncommon illustration that his son drew.

It seems clear that something was brewing and calling to be brought into form. Jung says ‘I felt an urge to give shape to something’ and ‘I was compelled from within.’ He speaks here like a true creative.

Anyone who has ever engaged in art knows this strange compulsion that calls one to your work desk.

Creative works we dedicate ourselves to—they take on a life cycle of their own—and they have their own wants and needs too, which are often expressed through our physiology.

Jung goes on to mention that he started writing it that Sunday and finished it in the course of three days.

The work itself consists of a series of sermons directed toward a crowd of spirits, who have come to Jung, demanding answers to their spiritual questions. Questions which they did not obtain answers for in life, which now gnaw at them in the afterlife.

It’s an entirely unique framework for such a discourse, and it is unlike anything else Jung wrote in his lifetime.

But as we are about to begin reading it… we face our first problem…

Jung wrote two versions of the Seven Sermons. One is a public version and one is a private version.

The private version is the one we see in the final chapter of The Red Book, it is spoken by Philemon, who is a sage-like figure that functions as Jung’s teacher throughout the Red Book. In this version, it is Philemon who speaks the sermons to the spirits of the dead, in response to their questions.

On the other hand, the public version, is the one Jung published himself in his lifetime, and shared with a few colleagues. It is also included in the appendix of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, with Jung’s permission.

This version does not mention the figure of Philemon at all. Instead, the sermons are credited to a Gnostic philosopher by the name of Basilides. And it is he, not Jung and not Philemon, who speaks directly to the dead.

So why did Jung paradoxically create a private and a public version of the same work? One seemingly leaving out a pivotal character and the other crediting the text to a Gnostic philosopher from nearly 2,000 years ago?

We will unpack the potential reasons for this distinction later on. For now, we will be using the public version, the one credited to Basilides, which you can find in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Throughout the episode, we will occasionally reference the private version with Philemon, in the instances where doing so will enrich our understanding of the text.

Let us begin:

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The Seven Sermons to the Dead, written by Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West.

Sermon 1 [church bells]

“The dead came back from Jerusalem…” “creatura…because it hath qualities: it is even quality itself.”

Ok. We’re gonna pause here because that is already a lot to unpack. So far this is half of the first sermon, we’ll resume the rest after exploring it for a minute.

First thing you may have noticed: this doesn’t sound like Carl Jung.

It is not in the tone of his signature academic writing and it is not in the tone of his personalized Red Book writing… to borrow a phrase from the Wizard of Oz… “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

The style of this writing immediately reminds me of spiritual and philosophical texts from the first and second centuries, current era time. And we know that Jung was very familiar with ancient religious texts and studying them was a passion of his.

So much so, that in 1952, the Jung Institute of Zurich went through great lengths to purchase Codex I of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, to add to Jung’s personal library. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures were a major archeological find in 1945, in Egypt. So the fact that a portion could be acquired by a private collection is very notable here. So what did Codex I contain… key writings by Gnostic philosophers of the first and second centuries. Bingo.

That collection of writings that fell into Jung’s hands is now commonly known among scholars as the Jung Codex. It’s all coming together.

That’s how important this stuff was to him. So we can assume this work, the Seven Sermons to the Dead, didn’t just appear out of thin air. But that by 1916, Jung was exploring these ancient texts, and that his inner world was already steeped in these writings.

Further evidence of this is his attribution of the Sermons to Basilides. A fascinating and controversial figure of early Christianity. We’ll get to him later.

First we need to establish the proper interpretive lens for this material. The one that most closely would resemble how Jung saw it himself. And for that, we’re going to consult the original Gnostic scriptures from the first and second century. The type that Jung would have read and been influenced by before writing the Seven Sermons.

In that first Sermon, which we just started exploring, there’s a unique concept Jung presents to us, he calls it: the Pleroma.

He writes: “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.”

It turns out that this word, Pleroma, is a Greek word, which translates as ‘fullness.’

As you read these Gnostic scriptures of the first and second centuries, you see this term appearing over and over again.

As a side note: in the Gnostic scriptures, you also find so many other little twists on early Christianity that most people never hear about, for example: there is the mention of sex with angels, there are passages that claim Jesus wasn’t crucified, but that a doppleganger was put in his place, there is a passage that claims Jesus would kiss Mary Magdalene, favoring her over all other disciples, and perhaps most strikingly of all, there a cosmology in Gnosticism that accounts for the existence of more than one God. Gnostic scriptures present us with a much richer and wilder version of Christianity, before the boundary lines of the Biblical canon became strictly enforced.

So given all of that, you can really understand why the early Catholic church chose to destroy all Gnostic scriptures and punish those who practiced it. And also why Jung found these scriptures so fascinating.

Back to the matter at hand, the term Pleroma, or fullness.

In the apocryphal text, The Book of Thomas, which is a collection of Jesus Christ’s sayings as spoken to Jude Thomas.

We find this passage:

“Then Thomas said to the lord, “So I beg you, then, before your ascension to tell me about the things I am asking you about. And once I have heard from you about the obscure things, then I can speak of them. And it seems clear to me that it is difficult to do the truth before humankind.

The savior answered, saying “If things that are visible unto you are obscure to you, how can you hear about those that are not visible? If the deeds of truth that are visible in the world are difficult for you to do, how then will you do those of exalted majesty and of the fullness, which are not visible?”

The way this term, fullness, or pleroma, is used in these texts implies a familiarity and common usage for the time. For example, in the Gnostic writing known as Ptolemy’s Version of the Gnostic Myth, the writer begins by describing the origin of gods and the cosmos, divinity is split into various parts, the intellect of divinity is called the ‘only-begotten’ and fullness is mentioned in this passage:

“Now, when this only-begotten perceived the ends for which it had been emitted, it emitted the Logos and life—a parent of the entirety of beings that were to exist after it and a source and forming of the entire fullness.”

The fullness they mention in this context refers to the Gnostic premise of the ‘spiritual universe.’ We can interpret that as all of the immaterial realms which encompass the physical plane but also exist above it.

We can better conceptualize this by a neighboring tradition, for example in Sufism the concept of spheres is presented to explain the upper realms. The idea being that our physical plane is the densest center sphere, but it is housed within several larger spheres, which contain the physical plane, but which the physical plane cannot extend into. It’s like a Russian doll situation.

The smallest doll in the center can only be itself. While each upper layer is technically itself and the layer it encompasses. Until you get to the outermost layer, which contains and influences them all. Fascinating stuff.

So when Jung uses the term Pleroma, in his mind, it comes with the baggage of all of these things…some immaterial material that contains the physical plane but which the physical plane cannot access. To me, it even calls to mind the concept of dark matter in physics. If Creative Codex was a college course, that would make a good topic for a thesis paper.

Which brings us to Jung’s final point about the Pleroma or fullness before he proceeds with the rest of the sermon. He poses the question: “But wherefore, then, do we speak of the pleroma at all, since it is thus everything and nothing?”

His response: “I speak of it to make a beginning somewhere, and also to free you from the delusion that somewhere, either without or within, there standeth something fixed, or in some way established, from the beginning. Every so-called fixed and certain thing is only relative.”

The way I interpret this passage is that Jung is saying there is a functional benefit to starting with the pleroma. There is a benefit to reflecting on it with its paradoxes and intellectual conundrums because, as he implies toward the end of that section, reflecting on it will loosen the intellect appropriately so that the mind can receive the insights necessary in the following sermons.

On that note, let’s continue with the rest of Sermon One. In this next section, Basilides describes the nature of man as distinctiveness, or the ability to discriminate and distinguish reality. Then he further elaborates on that point by saying that we must not entirely align ourselves with one pole in the realm of dualities, attempting to avoid the other, but instead, seek to balance our opposites.

For this reading, we will switch to the version of Sermon I found in The Red Book, as the translation of the phrasing is clearer and less vague.

The Sermon (p.511) continues:

“Thus we ask: how did the creation come into being?

Creatures came into being, but not creation: since creation is the very quality of the Pleroma, as much as noncreation, eternal death. Creation is ever-present, and so is death. The Pleroma has everything, differentiation and nondifferentiation.

Differentiation is creation. It is differentiated. Differentiation is its essence, and therefore it differentiates. Therefore
man differentiates, since his essence is differentiation. Therefore he also differentiates the qualities of the Pleroma that do not exist. He differentiates them on account of his own essence. Therefore he must speak of those qualities of the Pleroma that do not exist.”

“You say: ‘what use is there in speaking about it at all?’ Did you yourself not say that it is not worth thinking about the Pleroma?”

“I mentioned that to free you from the delusion that we are able to think about the Pleroma. When we distinguish the qualities of the Pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own differentiated state and about our own differentiation, but have effectively said nothing about the Pleroma. Yet we need to speak about our own differentiation, so that we may sufficiently differentiate ourselves. Our very nature is differentiation. If we are not true to this nature we do not differentiate ourselves enough. We must therefore make distinctions between qualities.”

“You ask: ‘what harm is there in not differentiating oneself?'”

“If we do not differentiate, we move beyond our essence, beyond creation, and we fall into nondifferentiation, which is the other quality of the Pleroma. We fall into the Pleroma itself and cease to be created beings. We lapse into dissolution in nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die to the same extent that we do not differentiate. Hence the creature’s essence strives toward differentiation and struggles against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the principium individuationis . This principle is the essence of the creature. From this you can see why nondifferentiation
and nondistinction pose a great danger to the creature.”

“We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the Pleroma. These qualities are pairs of opposites, such as the effective and the ineffective, the fullness and the emptiness, the living and the dead, the different and the same, light and darkness,
hot and cold, force and matter, time and space, good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the one and the many, etc.”

“The pairs of opposites are the qualities of the Pleroma that do not exist, because they cancel themselves out. As we are the Pleroma itself, we also have all these qualities in us. Since our nature is grounded in differentiation, we have these
qualities in the name and under the sign of differentiation, which means:

“First: these qualities are differentiated and separate in us; therefore they do not cancel each other out, but are effective. Thus we are the victims of the pairs of opposites. The Pleroma is rent within us.

“Second: these qualities belong to the Pleroma, and we must possess and live them only in the name and under the sign of
differentiation. We must differentiate ourselves from these qualities. They cancel each other out in the Pleroma, but not in us. Distinction from them saves us.

“When we strive for the good or the beautiful, we forget our essence, which is differentiation, and we fall subject to the spell of the qualities of the Pleroma, which are the pairs of opposites. We endeavor to attain the good and the beautiful, yet at the same time we also seize the evil and the ugly, since in the Pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. But if we remain true to our essence, which is differentiation, we differentiate ourselves from the good and the beautiful, and hence from the evil and ugly. And thus we do not fall under the spell of the Pleroma, namely into nothingness and dissolution.

“You object: you said that difference and sameness are also qualities of the Pleroma. What is it like if we strive for distinctiveness? Are we, in so doing, not true to our own nature? And must we nonetheless fall into sameness when we strive for distinctiveness?

“You must not forget that the Pleroma has no qualities. We create these through thinking. If, therefore, you strive for distinctiveness or sameness, or any qualities whatsoever, you pursue thoughts that flow to you out of the Pleroma: thoughts, namely, concerning the non-existing qualities of the Pleroma. Inasmuch as you run after these thoughts, you fall again into the Pleroma, and attain distinctiveness and sameness at the same time. Not your thinking, but your essence, is differentiation. Therefore you must not strive for what you conceive as distinctiveness, but for your own essence. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely the striving for one’s own essence. If you had this striving, you would not need to know anything about the Pleroma and its qualities, and yet you would attain the right goal by virtue of your own essence. Since, however, thought alienates us from our essence, I must teach you that knowledge with which you can bridle your thoughts.”

The dead faded away grumbling and moaning and their cries died away in the distance.”

This stuff is so fascinating. That’s why I stand by my conviction that Carl Jung is a creative genius. Here is what makes Seven Sermons to the Dead so special: in this esoteric text, Jung is using spiritual and metaphysical writing as a metaphor for his psychological concepts.

I mean… it’s such a strange and brilliant motivation. And we know that according to Jung’s own account, regarding the uncommon energy and tension in his house at the time of this writing, that this was an inspired creative work. As we mentioned before, creative works seem to have their own life cycles. And they have their own wants and needs too.

Meaning, this wasn’t some intellectual exercise. It seems to have been a kind of eureka moment for him. That’s why he finished it in three days.

This is a wholly creative work that was born out of the depths of Jung’s being. A source of depth which he had thoroughly enriched over the years with his two passions: psychological theories and ancient religious texts.

So how do we understand the second half of Sermon One? Let’s recap, the first half presented Jung’s thoughts on the Pleroma, an immaterial concept that pervades all of existence, the ancient Gnostics call it ‘fullness.’

But to understand how Jung is using it, we should shift our perspective a little. Although he is using the Pleroma in the context of this metaphysical / spiritual writing, as we see more of the text, he seems to be thinking of the Pleroma as a type of pre-conscious state of man, or perhaps, the unconscious. Let’s hold that thought… It will become important soon. (a pre-conscious state, it will become more important soon.)

In this second half of Sermon One, two other concepts come to the fore: differentiation and individuation. It’s easy to miss them when first reading the text.

Let’s break each one of these down and see their relevance. Then pull out for a bird’s eye view to see what it is that Jung is really doing in this text. He’s being very tricky here.

First, the concept of differentiation…

In Sermon One, Jung says:

“Differentiation is creation. It is differentiated. Differentiation is its essence, and therefore it differentiates. Therefore man differentiates, since his essence is differentiation.

When we distinguish the qualities of the Pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own differentiated state and about our own differentiation, but have effectively said nothing about the Pleroma. Yet we need to speak about our own differentiation, so that we may sufficiently differentiate ourselves.

Our very nature is differentiation. If we are not true to this nature, we do not differentiate ourselves enough. We must therefore make distinctions between qualities.

You ask: ‘What harm is there in not differentiating oneself?’

If we do not differentiate, we move beyond our essence, beyond creation, and we fall into non-differentiation, which is the other quality of the Pleroma. We fall into the Pleroma itself and cease to be created beings. We lapse into dissolution in nothingness. This is the death of the creature.”

Ok, so what is Jung saying here? It is something simple but profound.

Jung is saying that a defining feature of the human mind is its ability to make distinctions. And we generally know this. The mind has an amazing ability to distinguish between an infinite variety of people, places, objects, personalities, emotions, colors, animals, social boundaries, relationships, ad infinitum. Everything is distinguished and even named.

Jung argues, it is in the process of making these distinctions, that the mind defines itself. We do not exist in a vacuum, we exist only in relation to everything around us. These boundaries our mind invents— define us, for better or worse. And that is the process of differentiation.

Fascinating huh? Hope that makes sense. Feel free to re-listen to that part if it doesn’t, because it will be important for the next insights.

To this concept, Jung adds another little twist, when he writes:

“…man differentiates, since his essence is differentiation. Therefore he differentiates the qualities of the Pleroma that do not exist. He differentiates them on account of his own essence. Therefore he must speak of those qualities of the Pleroma that do not exist.”

It’s a paradoxical brain twister of phrasing. At first it might seem nonsensical.

But here is how I interpret it. As the mind differentiates the infinite nuances of its lived environment, there are times when it will differentiate itself not only from cold-hard reality. But also from perceived reality. That the mind will at times perceive something to be true which is actually a falsehood, but it will use that perceived truth to define itself. For example: If you know anyone who believes in conspiracy theories… Let’s say that person believes that politicians are actually reptilian creatures from the fourth dimension who eat babies.

Well, even in entertaining such a claim, the mind immediately defines itself based on this theoretical framework. It will define itself in relation to this illusion. It will say ‘well, I’m not a reptilian, so I must be more moral than these politicians.’ Or it may say ‘I would never eat a baby, so all these politicians must be inhuman.’

So you see, we define ourselves through this process of differentiation, even if our map of the world is deeply flawed.

Ok, so to recap, we have the pre-conscious or unconscious state of the Pleroma, we have the process of differentiation which is man’s nature, and now we arrive at the final point of Sermon One: individuation.

Here we will use a few key passages from Sermon One as they appear in Jung’s public version of the Seven Sermons, which you can find in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Baselides states:

“Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the Principium Individuationis. This principle is the essence of the creature. From this you can see why indistinctiveness and non-distinction are a great danger for the creature.

When we strive after the good or the beautiful, we thereby forget our own nature, which is distinctiveness, and we are delivered over to the qualities of the pleroma, which are pairs of opposites. We labor to attain to the good and the beautiful, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and the ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, and therefore, at the same time, from the evil and the ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely, into nothingness and dissolution.

Therefore not after difference, as ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being. If ye had this striving ye would not need to know anything about the pleroma and its qualities, and yet would ye come to your right goal by virtue of your own being.”

Here is where things get interesting—Jung brings in a term NOT found in Gnosticism. If he were simply making a knock off ancient Gnostic scripture, he would stick to the expected talking points…but here is one of those breadcrumbs, where we see Jung is doing something else entirely. The term he mentions is: Principium Individuationis. Plug this into Google translate, Latin to English, and what do you get: The Principle of Individuation.

One of the core concepts of Jungian psychology—Individuation.

What’s especially thought provoking to me is that Jung’s last great work before the Red Book was Psychology of the Unconscious, which was published in 1912, a year before he begins his Red Book explorations. In that book, there is not one single mention of this term—Individuation.

This tells us two things, either he was developing this theory in private, in his own work as a therapist, or he discovers it as a result of his Red Book explorations.

So what is Individuation?

The remarkable thing that Jung realized is that the mind is doing something. As if it is continually working on a project. It seems to be going through a processes of regulation and growth and transformation toward a certain end. When viewed in totality—the length of someone’s life—or a period of ten years in someone’s life, a pattern emerges. The way a pattern emerges when a pine tree grows from the potential latent in the seed. And that pattern, that end that the mind seems to always be working toward, Jung called it: Individuation.

That’s how I view it. It is this project that the mind is continually working on. The question then becomes: what is the goal of the project? Is there a goal or is the process the goal? Like an ever unfolding growth and reconciliation of disharmony.

Here is fellow Jungian analyst, Marie-Louise von Franz, writing about Individuation in her chapter of Jung’s book: Man & His Symbols.

Concerning Jung’s theory, Marie-Louise von Franz writes:

“By observing a great many people and studying their dreams (he estimated that he interpreted at least 80,000 dreams), Jung discovered not only that all dreams are relevant in varying degrees to the life of the dreamer, but that they are all parts of one great web of psychological factors. He also found that, on the whole, they seem to follow an arrangement or pattern. This pattern Jung called ‘the process of individuation.’

Many people even dream repeatedly of the same figures, landscapes, or situations; and if one follows these through a whole series, one will see that they change slowly but perceptibly. These changes can be accelerated if the dreamer’s conscious attitude is influenced by appropriate interpretation of the dreams and their symbolic contents.

Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth—the process of individuation.

Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges, and by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. The fact that we often speak of ‘arrested development’ shows that we assume that such a process of growth and maturation is possible with every individual. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolized by the tree, whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfills a definite pattern.

…this process takes place in man (as well as in every other living being) by itself and in the unconscious; it is a process by which man lives out his innate human nature. Strictly speaking, however, the process of individuation is real only if the individual is aware of it and consciously makes a living connection with it.

We do not know whether the pine tree is aware of its own growth, whether it enjoys and suffers the different vicissitudes that shape it. But man certainly is able to participate consciously in his development. He even feels that from time to time, by making free decisions, he can co-operate actively with it. This co-operation belongs to the process of individuation in the narrower sense of the word.”

And so, as far as I can tell, the first time that this key theory of Jungian analysis appears in a published work… is in Seven Sermons to the Dead… veiled in philosophical metaphors.

And notice the order of the insights we explored in Sermon One: Pleroma, differentiation, individuation… Jung isn’t just laying out some metaphysical creation story here, he is laying out the core of his psychological theories. The Pleroma as an unconscious or pre-conscious state, differentiation as a mechanism of the human mind to distinguish oneself, and individuation as a lifelong pattern of growth, largely unconscious, that the mind is engaged in.

This is what I really want you to take away from this episode. This is the deeper hidden meaning of the Seven Sermons to the Dead. Jung is using spiritual concepts as a metaphor for psychological concepts.

[music]

INTERMISSION

I hope you’re enjoying this episode of Creative Codex, Carl Jung, Seven Sermons to the Dead. This is a brief intermission before we continue with the next section. In most podcasts, this would be the point where you hear an ad for mattresses, or sandwiches, or underwear.

We don’t do that on this show, not for the foreseeable future. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the cool stuff you can find on my Patreon. If you become a supporter of the show, for as little as $1, you can gain access to all of the Creativity Tip mini-episodes, including the ever controversial Drugs & Creativity, which is not available in the podcast feed, along with a dozen others which are only available to Patrons as well.

In addition, for each episode of the show, I also release Episode Exclusives, which are unique tidbits and segments about the creative geniuses featured on Creative Codex. For example, one Episode Exclusive is all about a rare letter that Theo van Gogh sent to his wife, Johanna, which describes Vincent van Gogh with surprising honesty, revealing both his strengths and weaknesses.

Another Episode Exclusive, which I just released, is all about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s relationship. Specifically their letters around 1913, when Jung splits from Freud, giving him a piece of his mind in the process. On that mini-episode we even explore an argument they had about supernatural phenomenon and a particularly critical letter that Jung sends to Freud, accusing him of unhealthy behavior with his students, and encouraging Freud to seek therapy himself for his characteristic neuroticism.

It really gives some extra context to this time period, during which Jung suffers a mental breakdown in December 1913, leading to the now notorious experiences of The Red Book. So check that out on my Patreon: patreon.com/mjdorian

And finally, in the coming month, I will begin releasing some exclusive full length episodes to Patreon. The focus of the show will still be episodes like this one which are free-to-listen in any podcast player, but I also want to reward my dedicated supporters with something special. These episodes will be called Limited Releases, and will not appear in this main podcast feed. They will only be available to supporters in the $5 and up tiers.

The first Limited Release episode will be a deep dive into the mind and music of Kurt Cobain. Yes. The grunge rock genius of the band Nirvana. I’m producing that one already, and it’s a lot of fun for me, Kurt Cobain was one of my first music idols in high school. So stay tuned for that one. It will be available soon on patreon.com/mjdorian under the Limited Release series.

And now…back to Carl Jung: Seven Sermons to the Dead.

[music]

Chapter Two: God Is Not Dead

We have now thoroughly covered the lessons of Sermon One. And you might now understand why Jung only published this work privately, and even at the end of his life, expressed reluctance about letting it be included in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Interestingly, Seven Sermons to the Dead is not published in the massive full collection of his work known as the Collected Works.

Sermon One was long and esoteric and filled with thoughtful ruminations. The following Sermons are shorter but still equally esoteric. Our aim will be again, not to interpret them, but to understand them the way Jung must have understood them.

In Sermon Two, he introduces us to a new God, a ‘God above the Gods’, one that transcends good and evil. A god which, this Basilides character Jung is speaking through, seems to hold very highly in his personal cosmology. That god is: Abraxas. We will soon learn why.

[bells]

Sermon Two:

[music]

“In the night the dead stood along the wall and cried:

We would have knowledge of god. Where is god? Is god dead?

God is not dead. Now, as ever, he liveth. God is creatura, for he is something definite, and therefore distinct from the pleroma. God is quality of the pleroma, and everything which I said of creatura also
is true concerning him. He is distinguished, however, from created beings through this, that he is more indefinite and indeterminable than they. He is less distinct than created beings, since the ground of his being is
effective fullness. Only in so far as he is definite and distinct is he creatura, and in like measure is he the manifestation of the effective fullness of the pleroma.

Everything which we do not distinguish falleth into the pleroma and is made void by its opposite. If, therefore, we do not distinguish god, effective fullness is for us extinguished. Moreover god is the pleroma itself, as likewise each smallest point
in the created and uncreated is the pleroma itself. Effective void is the nature of the devil. God and devil are the first
manifestations of nothingness, which we call the pleroma. It is indifferent whether the pleroma is or is not, since in everything it is balanced and void. Not so creatura. In so far as god and devil are creatura they do not extinguish each other, but stand one against the other as effective opposites. We need no proof of their existence. It is enough that we must always be speaking of them. Even if both were not, creatura, of its own essential distinctiveness, would forever distinguish them anew out of the pleroma.

Everything that discrimination taketh out of the pleroma is a pair of opposites.

To god, therefore, always belongeth the devil.

This inseparability is as close and, as your own life hath made you see, as indissoluble as the pleroma itself. Thus it is that both stand very close to the pleroma, in which all opposites are extinguished and joined. God and devil are distinguished by the qualities fullness and emptiness, generation and destruction. EFFECTIVENESS is common to both. Effectiveness joineth them. Effectiveness, therefore, stahdeth above both; is a god above god, since in its effect it uniteth fullness and emptiness. This is a god whom ye knew not, for mankind forgot it. We name it by its name ABRAXAS. It is more indefinite still than god and devil.

That god may be distinguished from it, we name god HELIOS or Sun. Abraxas is effect. Nothing standeth opposed to it but the ineffective; hence its effective nature freely unfoldeth itself. The ineffective is not, therefore resisteth not. Abraxas standeth above the sun and above the devil. It is improbable probability, unreal reality. Had the pleroma a being, Abraxas would be its manifestation. It is the effective itself, not any particular effect, but effect in general.

It is unreal reality, because it hath no definite effect. It is also creatura, because it is distinct from the pleroma. The sun hath a definite effect, and so hath the devil. Wherefore do they appear to us more effective than indefinite Abraxas. It is force, duration, change.

The dead now raised a great tumult, for they were Christians.”

This sermon is much shorter than Sermon One. But it is densely packed with thoughtful reflections. For starters, Jung-Basilides, as we’ll call him, frames the Sermon by stating God is creation. Hence God is a quality of the Pleroma. Likewise saying that the Devil is an emanation from it too. He says ‘God and devil are the first manifestations of nothingness, which we call the pleroma.’ The key here being that they are created together, as a duality, mutually dependent.

Then Jung throws this at us: “Everything that discrimination taketh out of the pleroma is a pair of opposites. To god, therefore, always belongeth the devil.”

It’s a deceptively simple yet brilliant line.

Here is how I understand that. If we consider it functionally, the way we understood Sermon One, we carry forward the concept of differentiation. If you recall, Jung-Basilides said that ‘man’s nature is differentiation.’ Or as we understood it: the act of distinguishing the facets of our lived reality.

So, in Sermon Two, Jung adds a new wrinkle: he is saying that the act of this discrimination itself creates duality, creates opposites. The psychological process we use to distinguish anything about our reality implicitly creates the opposites around us, as a counterbalancing force, to help us to better understand the height and breadth of things. Here we are talking about literally every facet of human experience, for example: from distinguishing light and dark we understand brightness, from experiencing happiness we understand the depths of sadness as something we want to avoid, from seeing death we appreciate life, from measuring evil we truly know what is good. And so on.

Basilides is speaking metaphysically here, but Jung is speaking psychologically. He says:

“Everything which we do not distinguish falleth into the pleroma and is made void by its opposite. If, therefore, we do not distinguish God, effective fullness is for us extinguished.”

If we follow with the understanding that we established earlier, that for Jung, the Pleroma is the unconscious, we can understand that the unconscious holds all these potentialities, without the label of black and white, without duality, without judgement or discernment. It is the function of our conscious mind to create differentiation, and thereby, call these things up from the unconscious, creating the pairs of opposites.

Jung-Basilides says: “If therefore, we do not distinguish god, effective fullness is for us extinguished.” I have to wonder here if by ‘effective fullness’ he is not implying something else… Knowing Gnostic texts, we would say that Basilides is talking about the spiritual universe. But what could Jung be talking about?

The fully realized and embodied Self, which is the goal of individuation. If there was a metaphysical metaphor for that, it certainly would sound something like ‘effective fullness,’ right?

So what Jung seems to be saying is that an engagement with the God archetype, is in some fashion required in the individuation process.

Now that statement alone would warrant an entire separate episode.The implication being we must all wrestle with God in some way, we must all integrate a relationship with a higher ideal or power to develop fully realized beings… Whoooo… This is crazy good stuff. And he manages to express it in the fewest words. It’s no wonder that decades later Jung would continue admitting that the work he did from 1913 – 1916, of The Red Book and culminating in the Seven Sermons, formed the nucleus of his theories. And continued to be a lifelong source of inspiration to him.

We can relate this insight about God’s role in the individuation process to Jung’s later work: when he is elaborating on the archetypes, he mentions that the God archetype, in stories or dreams often represents the Self. That is the capital ’S’—Self— of Jungian theory. The totality of the psyche which includes the conscious mind, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious minds as one united being.

Is that what God is to Jung? A symbolic figurehead at the peak of the pyramid of the mind. A directing force of the unified mind in all its conscious and unconscious parts… I’m not saying that’s what he’s implying… but the association is certainly there.

In the book, Man and His Symbols, published in 1964, Jung talks of God, and writes this incredible passage:

[music]

“Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him? The rabbi replied: “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.”

This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious psychological investigation.

We can no longer afford to be so God-Almighty-like as to set ourselves up as judges of the merits or demerits of natural phenomena. We do not base our botany upon the old-fashioned division into useful and useless plants, or our zoology upon the naive distinction between harmless and dangerous animals. But we still complacently assume that consciousness is sense and the unconscious is nonsense. In science such an assumption would be laughed out of court. Do microbes, for instance, make sense or nonsense?

Whatever the unconscious may be, it is a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful.

We cannot expect someone who has never looked through a microscope to be an authority on microbes; in the same way, no one who has not made a serious study of natural symbols can be considered a competent judge in this matter.

But the general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions, nor the philosophies, nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice.”

[music end]

It’s becoming clear that the Seven Sermons to the Dead are much more than they appear. Every other line seems to hold some unspoken significance in the larger context of Carl Jung’s psychological theories. It’s startling and strange. As a student of Western Esotericism, I’ve read esoteric spiritual texts before—such as Hermetic philosophy, writings of Kabbalah, and magic treatises. But never anything like this one.

Jung isn’t just laying out some metaphysical creation story here, he is laying out the core of his psychological theories. During a pivotal point in his life when he has split from the popular Freudian view of the mind, and is founding a new school of psychology known as: Analytical Psychology. Which continues to this day.

The Seven Sermons is an inspired work of creative genius, where Jung is using spiritual concepts as a metaphor for psychological concepts. Theories which he will elaborate on for for the next fifty years.

In the last year of his life, Jung was working on one final project. It would be a book not intended for clinicians or therapists, but a book meant for the public. Throughout his life, he was weary of the idea that his theories could be presented to the public effectively without distilling them, and thereby losing their nuance. He was a man accustomed to navigating the depths, a liminal place without absolutes.

But through the encouragement and request of his colleagues, many of them celebrated psychologists in their right, he attempted the task.

The result was the book: Man and His Symbols. (I have a large volume copy of it, picked it up from a thrift store once. It has full color illustrations and photographs, and on the front cover is a gold embossed labyrinth… I never thought much of the book, because)

When you see the table of contents, you realize Jung only wrote one of the chapters. The others being essays written by colleagues he respected in Analytical Psychology.

But here is the kicker. His chapter is called: Approaching the Unconscious. And he finished it 10 days before his death.

Jung made a point to write this chapter in English. So it appears here for us the exact way he intended it to. No chance of mistranslation. As I was deciphering the Seven Sermons I opened up Man and His Symbols and stumbled on this especially relevant passage. Jung writes: “Our actual knowledge of the unconscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon and that, like Nature herself, it is at least neutral. It contains all the aspects of human nature—light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly.”

In this, one of his last messages to humankind, Jung returns to one of the main points of Seven Sermons to the Dead. As we came to understand in Sermon One, the Pleroma is a stand in for the unconscious mind. Basilides states the Pleroma or Unconscious has no duality, it is neither good nor evil, and by itself, lacks differentiation. 45 years after Seven Sermons, Jung still stands by this understanding of the unconscious.

Here is the full version of that closing passage from Jung’s final work, which he completed 10 days before his passing:

[music]

“I have spent more than half a century in investigating natural symbols, and I have come to the conclusion that dreams and their symbols are not stupid and meaningless. On the contrary, dreams provide the most interesting information for those who take the trouble to understand their symbols. The results, it is true, have little to do with such worldly concerns as buying and selling. But the meaning of life is not exhaustively explained by one’s business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.

In a period of human history when all available energy is spent in the investigation of nature, very little attention is paid to the essence of man, which is his psyche, although many researches are made into its conscious functions. But the really complex and unfamiliar part of the mind, from which symbols are produced, is still virtually unexplored. It seems almost incredible that though we receive signals from it every night, deciphering these communications seems too tedious for any but a very few people to be bothered with it. Man’s greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, and it is often directly mistrusted and despised. “It’s only psychological” too often means: It is nothing.

Where, exactly, does this immense prejudice come from? We have obviously been so busy with the question of what we think that we entirely forget to ask what the unconscious psyche thinks about us. The ideas of Sigmund Freud confirmed for most people the existing contempt for the psyche. Before him it had been merely overlooked and neglected; it has now become a dump for moral refuse.

This modern standpoint is surely one-sided and unjust. It does not even accord with the known facts. Our actual knowledge of the unconscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon and that, like Nature herself, it is at least neutral. It contains all aspects of human nature—light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly. The study of individual, as well as of collective, symbolism is an enormous task, and one that has not yet been mastered. But a beginning has been made at last. The early results are encouraging, and they seem to indicate an answer to many so far unanswered questions of present-day mankind.”

[music]

On the next Creative Codex… Jung introduces us to a new God. Abraxas. A God above duality—a God above Gods. Why is Abraxas so important? We will also answer the question: Who was Basilides? And why did Jung choose this controversial figure of early Christianity as the author of the Sermons? And finally, what do Sermons Three and Four reveal about Jung’s visionary understanding of psychology?

We have only scratched the surface of this rare creative work. It’s time to dig even deeper, join me for Part 2 of Carl Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead.

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