Quick Answer
The only sustained commentary in English on the strangest thing Jung ever wrote: seven sermons preached to the dead in the voice of a second-century Gnostic, composed in 1916 during the years of the Red Book and printed privately for friends. Hoeller translates the text, explains it sermon by sermon, and argues that its author was a Gnostic in the full sense. The exposition is clear and the parallels are sound. The argument is partisan, from a Gnostic bishop who wanted Jung on his side, and it was written a quarter-century before the Red Book revealed the sermons' original setting. Read it for the text and the reading; hold the thesis loosely.
Key Takeaways
- 1916, the house full of the dead: the sermons' origin in Jung's own crisis.
- Pleroma and Creatura: the fullness of opposites and the distinctness of the self.
- Abraxas: the god who contains god and devil.
- The star: the seventh sermon's answer to the dead.
- Hoeller's thesis: Jung as Gnostic, stated with conviction and without the Red Book.
17 min read
What This Book Is
The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead was published by Quest Books, the Theosophical Publishing House, in 1982. It is around two hundred and forty pages. It contains four introductory chapters on Jung's relation to Gnosticism, the text of the Seven Sermons in Hoeller's own translation, seven chapters of commentary, one per sermon, and a conclusion arguing that Jung's psychology is a modern Gnosis.
The sermons themselves occupy about fifteen pages. They are the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, seven sermons to the dead, written by Jung in 1916, printed privately in a small edition, and given to friends over the years without ever being published under his name in his lifetime. They appeared publicly in 1962 as an appendix to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and were removed from later editions at the family's request.
Hoeller's book was for twenty-seven years the only sustained treatment of the text, and it remains the only commentary of length in English. The Red Book, published in 2009, has since given the sermons their original context and Jung's own gloss, and this review takes account of both.
Two texts, two frames. The privately printed 1916 sermons are attributed to Basilides in Alexandria and stand alone. In the Red Book the same sermons are spoken by Philemon, the winged old man who was Jung's inner teacher, and each is followed by Jung's questions and Philemon's explanations. Hoeller had only the first. A reader now has both and should use both.
The Origin of the Sermons
Jung told the story in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and Hoeller retells it.
In the years after his break with Freud, Jung entered the period of inner confrontation that the Red Book records: visions, dialogues with figures from the unconscious, fear of madness. In the winter of 1916 the atmosphere in his house grew strange. His children had nightmares; his eldest daughter saw a white figure pass through her room; the doorbell rang violently on a Sunday afternoon with nobody there and the bell visibly moving. Jung felt the house crammed with presences. He asked what was there and heard the answer: we have come back from Jerusalem, where we found not what we sought. He began to write, and over three evenings the sermons came out of him whole. The presences left. He did not regard the text as composed in the ordinary sense.
Hoeller's account of this is faithful and he draws the right conclusion: whatever one thinks of the sermons, their author did not think he was writing a treatise. He thought he was transcribing, and the archaic voice and the attribution to Basilides are the marks of that.
Why Basilides
The choice of pseudonym, which Hoeller reads well.
Basilides taught in Alexandria in the early second century and was, by the Fathers' reports, one of the most philosophical of the Gnostics: he taught a God who is not, beyond being, from whom the world seed unfolded; an Abraxas whose name adds to 365; and a way of salvation by knowledge that owed as much to Greek philosophy as to Christian revelation. Only fragments survive. Jung signed the sermons as Basilides in Alexandria, the city where East meets West, and the choice says what he thought the text was: a Gnostic revelation, from the tradition that had joined Greek thought to religious experience, spoken again.
Hoeller adds that the attribution was also a distance. Jung was a psychiatrist with a reputation, and a text preached to the dead in the voice of a heresiarch was not something he could publish as his own. The mask let it exist.
Who Stephan Hoeller Is
Stephan Hoeller was born in Budapest in 1931, left Hungary after the war, and settled in Los Angeles, where since 1967 he has been bishop of the Ecclesia Gnostica, a small church that practises a liturgical Gnosticism, and where he has lectured for decades at the Gnostic Society on Jung, the Gnostics, Kabbalah, alchemy and the Western esoteric tradition. His books include Jung and the Lost Gospels and Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing.
He is, as he says, a Gnostic, and his reading of Jung is a Gnostic's reading of a text he regards as scripture. The book is not neutral and does not pretend to be; its value lies in the intimacy of a commentator who has lived inside the tradition the sermons revive. Readers should know the position and read accordingly.
The First Sermon: The Pleroma
The dead come back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought, and ask to be taught. Basilides begins with nothingness.
Nothingness is the same as fullness. In the infinite, full is the same as empty. The Pleroma is this fullness-and-nothingness, in which every quality is present and cancelled by its opposite, so that it has all qualities and none. The Creatura, the created, is not in the Pleroma but in itself; it is distinctness, and distinctness is its essence. The human being is the point at which distinction is made and held. The danger is to fall back into the Pleroma, into sameness, into dissolution, and the sermon's teaching is that we must distinguish ourselves, hold our own quality against the pull toward the undifferentiated, or we cease to be.
Hoeller reads this as Jung's first statement of individuation: the ego must separate from the unconscious and defend its distinctness, and the Pleroma is the unconscious as the totality of opposites in which no ego can survive. The parallel to the Valentinian Pleroma is real but inverted: for the Gnostics the Pleroma was home, for Jung it is the thing one must not fall into. Hoeller notices the inversion and reads it as Jung's originality.
The Second Sermon: God and Devil, and Abraxas
The dead ask about God. Basilides answers that God is not dead, but is as alive as ever; God is the Creatura, effective fullness, and his opposite is the devil, effective emptiness. Both are effective, both are Creatura, and both are subordinate to a god beyond them whom few know: Abraxas, effectiveness itself, force, duration, change, in whom god and devil are united.
The sermon is the book's theological centre. Jung's god is not the Christian Father but one pole of a pair, and above the pair stands a totality that includes both. Hoeller reads Abraxas as the image of the self as Jung would later define it, the union of opposites that is neither good nor evil because it contains both, and he connects it to the Gnostic Abraxas of Basilides and to the amulets on which the name appears. The reading is fair and the parallel is exact.
The Third Sermon: Abraxas
The dead demand to be taught about the god it is hard to know, and the third sermon is a hymn to him.
Abraxas is the sun and the eternal sucking void, the brightness of the sun and the darkness of the devil, love and its murder, the holy and the betrayer, the clearest light of day and the deepest night of madness. To see him is blindness. He is the hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning, the lord of toads and frogs who live in water and go on land, the monster of the underworld. He is the mightiest and the most terrible, and the sermon ends: he is terrible.
Hoeller's commentary is at its best here. He shows that Abraxas is not a Satanic figure but a totality, that the terror is the terror of the whole seen without the filter of a moral split, and that Jung's later insistence that the God-image must include its dark side, in Aion and in Answer to Job, is this sermon expanded into theology. Readers who know only the later Jung will find here the first, rawest form of his quarrel with a wholly good God.
The Fourth Sermon: The Gods
The dead murmur that they want to hear of gods and devils, and Basilides gives them a pantheon.
The sun god is the highest good, the devil is his opposite, and between them stand the many gods and devils, the multiplicity of the Creatura. Among the gods are the four: the sun, Eros, the tree of life and the devil, and the sermon sets out their relations: Eros as the binder, the tree as the grower, the sun as the source, the devil as the dissolver. Multiplicity, the sermon says, is the distinctness that keeps the human being from falling into the Pleroma; the gods are many so that we may be many.
Hoeller reads the fourfold as the quaternity of Jung's later thought, the four functions and the mandala, and the polytheism as Jung's insistence that the psyche is plural and that monotheism, taken as psychology, is the ego's tyranny over the many. The reading is more speculative than the earlier ones and Hoeller says so.
The Fifth Sermon: Community and Sexuality
The dead ask about church and community, and the fifth sermon distinguishes two gods: the Mother, the celestial, spiritual, and the Phallus, the earthly, sexual, and the two ways of being together that follow from them.
Spirituality conceives and embraces; sexuality begets and creates. The one is female in the mother and the other is male in the phallus, and both are beyond the human and belong to the daimonic. Community, the sermon says, is necessary for the weak and destructive for the strong, and the individual must be alone before God and not dissolve into the herd.
Hoeller reads the sermon as Jung's early theory of the anima and animus and as his warning against collective identity, which became a lifelong theme. He also reads it, more contentiously, as a Gnostic sacramental theology of sexuality, which is more Hoeller than Jung.
The Sixth Sermon: The Serpent and the Bird
The daimon of sexuality is the serpent, and of spirituality the white bird. The serpent is earthly, feminine in the sense of the sermon, seductive, connected to the dead; the bird is heavenly, a messenger, and carries what is thought into the beyond. The two are the human being's daimons, and the way is not to serve one but to know both.
Hoeller connects the serpent and bird to the Gnostic ophite symbolism and to the alchemical images Jung would later study, and he reads the sermon as an early sketch of the transcendent function, the tension of opposites from which the third arises. It is a short sermon and a short chapter.
The Seventh Sermon: The Star
The dead return at night, and ask for the last teaching about the human being.
The human being is a gateway through which one passes from the outer world of gods and daimons into the inner world, and in the inner world the human being is small, so small that the gods and their world are far away and there is only one thing: the star. Each person has one star, their own god, in the immeasurable distance, and it is the one goal of the soul, toward which the soul travels at death, and beyond which there is nothing. This is the god that is, and the sermons end: the dead were silent and rose like smoke above the shepherd's fire, who guarded his flock by night.
Hoeller reads the star as the self, the individual centre that is the goal of individuation and that stands above all the collective gods, and he connects it to the Gnostic doctrine of the spark, the inner light that belongs to no archon and is the person's true origin and end. It is the reading the sermon invites and the chapter is the book's most moving.
The seventh sermon is what the whole text was for. The dead had been to Jerusalem, to the tradition, and found nothing; they came to the teacher and were given a cosmology of opposites, a god of terror, a pantheon; and none of it satisfied. The last sermon does, and its content is almost nothing: you have one star, it is your own, go toward it. Jung had spent three years in the unconscious among gods and dead, and the thing he came back with was that the individual centre is the only god that finally matters. Everything in the later psychology, the self, individuation, the refusal of collective identity, is that sentence worked out. Hoeller sees this and says so, and it is the reason his book is worth having.
The Anagram
The sermons close with a string of letters that Jung never explained: NAHTRIHECCUNDE GAHINNEVERAHTUNIN ZEHGESSURKLACH ZUNNUS. Hoeller discusses the attempts to decode it, including Jung's remark that it contained a message he did not wish to make public, and he offers no solution. The Red Book prints the anagram as well and Shamdasani's notes do not solve it. It is the text's last refusal to be fully known, and Hoeller is right to leave it standing.
The Gnostic Parallels
The book's scholarly contribution.
Hoeller sets the sermons beside the Gnostic sources: the Basilidean fragments in Hippolytus and Irenaeus, the Valentinian Pleroma, the Abraxas gems, the ophite serpent, the Naassene bird, the spark doctrine of the Nag Hammadi texts. The parallels are real, and Jung knew the Gnostic material from the Fathers, since he had studied it before 1916 and was already using it in Symbols of Transformation. What Hoeller shows is that the sermons are not decoration but a serious attempt to speak the Gnostic language from the inside, and that Jung's later reading of Gnosticism as the historical ancestor of depth psychology began as this attempt to be a Gnostic for three evenings.
Hoeller's Thesis: Jung the Gnostic
The argument of the framing chapters and the conclusion.
Hoeller holds that Gnosticism is not a dead heresy but a perennial way, defined by knowledge through inner experience rather than belief through authority, by the recognition that the world as given is not the ultimate, and by the discovery of a divine spark in the self that is one's true origin. He argues that Jung's psychology has all three marks: it proceeds by experience of the unconscious, it treats the ego's world as a surface, and it finds in the self a centre that transcends the personal. The sermons, in which Jung speaks as a Gnostic without disguise, are the evidence that the psychology was a Gnosis from the start and that the later empirical language was the mask.
The thesis is stated with force and it is not absurd. It is also the reading of a Gnostic bishop who wanted the century's most influential psychologist for his tradition, and it passes over how much of Jung was not Gnostic: his Kantian caution about metaphysical claims, his insistence on the reality of the world and the body, his lifelong argument with Christianity from inside rather than outside it.
Jung's Own Denials
Hoeller reports them and reads them as tactical.
Jung said repeatedly that he was not a Gnostic, that he was an empiricist describing psychic facts, that the resemblance between his findings and the Gnostic systems was because both described the same psyche and not because he had adopted a metaphysics. He regretted the sermons' publication in 1962 and called them a sin of his youth. Martin Buber attacked him in 1952 as a Gnostic who had reduced God to a psychic event, and Jung replied at length that he was doing psychology, not theology.
Hoeller treats the denials as the public position of a man who could not afford the label, and there is something in that. But the denials were also sincere: Jung believed that his method was different from the Gnostics' in a way that mattered, and the difference was that he claimed to describe experiences rather than to teach a doctrine about their objects. The reader should weigh both.
What the Red Book Changed
The context Hoeller did not have.
The Red Book, published in 2009 in Sonu Shamdasani's edition, contains the sermons in the section called Scrutinies, where they are spoken by Philemon, not Basilides, to the dead who crowd Jung's house. Each sermon is followed by dialogue: Jung asks Philemon what he meant, and Philemon explains. The Pleroma, Philemon says, is the ground from which the soul must separate; Abraxas is the god one cannot serve; the star is the god one must find. The sermons, in this setting, are not a freestanding Gnostic tract but a chapter in the story of Jung's confrontation with the unconscious, and their meaning is given by the confrontation.
This does not refute Hoeller but it reframes him. The sermons are Gnostic in form because Jung's inner teacher spoke that way; whether Jung was a Gnostic is then a question about Philemon, which is a question about what one thinks Philemon was. Readers should read the sermons in the Red Book after reading them in Hoeller, and will find both changed by the pairing.
The Sermons in the Later Jung
Worth tracing, since Hoeller does it well.
The Pleroma as the unconscious totality, the Creatura as distinctness, and the danger of dissolution become the theory of individuation. Abraxas becomes the self as the union of opposites and the argument, in Aion and Answer to Job, that the God-image has a shadow. The four gods become the quaternity. The star becomes the self as centre and goal. The warning against community becomes the critique of mass man in The Undiscovered Self. Nearly every later concept has its seed in the fifteen pages, and Hoeller's book is the best map of the seeds.
The Objections
Three.
It is advocacy. Hoeller wants Jung to be a Gnostic and reads accordingly.
It is dated. Written before the Red Book, the Black Books and forty years of Jung scholarship, it lacks the context that now governs the text.
The translation is Hoeller's. It is serviceable but not authoritative, and readers should compare the Memories, Dreams, Reflections appendix and the Red Book.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have met the sermons in Memories, Dreams, Reflections or online and found them opaque; Hoeller's sermon-by-sermon exposition is the clearest there is.
Read it if you are interested in Gnosticism as a living tradition rather than a historical one, since Hoeller is its most articulate modern voice.
Read it alongside the Red Book, so that the Gnostic reading and the biographical one can correct each other.
Read the seventh sermon and Hoeller's chapter on it if you read nothing else.
The sermons' teaching, whatever their author's allegiance, is about where to look for God. The dead went to Jerusalem, to the tradition, the holy city, the place where the answer was supposed to be kept, and came back with nothing. The teacher gave them a cosmology and a terrible god and a pantheon, and they were not satisfied. What satisfied them was being told that each of them had a star that was their own, small and distant, and that everything else was a way of not going toward it. Jung's later work made that sentence into a psychology; Hoeller makes it into a religion; the reader can decide which it is. What neither disputes is that the star is not in Jerusalem, and that the dead are anyone who has looked there and found the place empty.
Jung's Gnostic sermons, translated and explained one by one, from the commentator who has lived inside the tradition they revive.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's partisanship and of what the Red Book has changed is given above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the Seven Sermons to the Dead?
A short text Jung wrote in 1916, in the voice of the second-century Gnostic teacher Basilides, addressed to the dead who return from Jerusalem having found nothing. In seven sermons it sets out a cosmology of the Pleroma, the Creatura, the god Abraxas, and the star within, in archaic Gnostic language. Jung printed it privately and gave copies to friends.
What is this book?
Stephan Hoeller's 1982 study, published by Quest Books, which prints the sermons in Hoeller's own translation and gives a chapter of commentary on each, with introductory chapters on Jung's relation to Gnosticism and a closing argument that Jung was a Gnostic in the proper sense.
Who is Stephan Hoeller?
A Hungarian-born writer and bishop of the Ecclesia Gnostica in Los Angeles, born 1931, who has taught Gnosticism, Jung and the Western esoteric traditions for decades and who reads Jung as a modern continuation of the ancient Gnostic vision. He is an advocate, not a neutral scholar, and says so.
Why did Jung write in the name of Basilides?
The sermons came out of the same inner experience as the Red Book, in which Jung's house filled with the presence of the dead and he was compelled to write. He attributed the text to Basilides of Alexandria, where East and West meet, because its content was Gnostic and because he wanted to distance himself from a work he did not regard as his in the ordinary sense.
What is the Pleroma in the sermons?
The fullness and the nothingness, in which all opposites are contained and cancel each other, so that it has every quality and none. The Creatura, the created world, is distinctness within the Pleroma, and the human being is the point at which distinction is achieved and must be defended against dissolution.
Who is Abraxas?
The god beyond the god of good and the devil of evil, who unites them: terrible, generative, the sun and its eternal sucking void at once. The sermons call him the god it is hard to know, and Hoeller reads him as the image of the totality that includes what conventional religion excludes.
What does the last sermon say?
That each person has a star, their own god, toward which the soul travels at death, and that this star is the one true goal, beyond all the gods of the sermons. The dead, hearing this, are silent and rise, and the text ends with an anagram Jung never explained.
How does the Red Book change the picture?
The Red Book, published in 2009, contains the sermons in their original setting, delivered by Philemon rather than Basilides, with Jung's own commentary that the earlier printing omitted. Hoeller wrote before this was available, and readers should now read the sermons in the Red Book as well.
Was Jung a Gnostic?
Hoeller says yes, in the sense that Jung's psychology is a modern form of the Gnostic way of knowledge by inner experience. Jung himself resisted the label, insisting that he was an empirical psychologist, and scholars are divided. The sermons are the strongest evidence for Hoeller's side.
Is the commentary reliable?
As an exposition of the sermons' content and of the Gnostic parallels, it is sound and clear. As a claim about Jung, it is partisan, and it was written without the Red Book, the Black Books and the scholarship of the last forty years. Read it as an interpretation by a committed Gnostic.
Is the text available elsewhere?
The sermons appear as an appendix in early editions of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in the Red Book in their full setting, and in several translations online. Hoeller's book is the one sustained commentary in English.
Who should read it?
Readers of Jung who have met the sermons and found them baffling, students of Gnosticism curious about its most famous modern revival, and anyone who wants the case that depth psychology is a religion made by a man who denied it.
Ask where you went looking
The sermons begin with the dead returning from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. Before reading further, name your Jerusalem: the tradition, the teacher, the book, the practice you went to for the answer and came back from with less than you hoped. The sermons do not say the pilgrimage was wrong. They say that what the dead needed was not there, and that it was somewhere much smaller and closer, a single star that belonged to no one else. Jung spent three years finding out that this was true for him. The text is fifteen pages, and it will not take three years to read, but it may take that long to believe.
Sources & References
- Hoeller, Stephan A. The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, Quest Books, 1982.
- Jung, C. G. The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, 2009, Scrutinies section.
- Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1962, appendix (early editions).
- Segal, Robert A., ed. The Gnostic Jung, Princeton, 1992, for the scholarly debate.
- Hippolytus. Refutation of All Heresies 7, for the Basilidean fragments.
- Buber, Martin. Eclipse of God, 1952, and Jung's reply, for the Gnostic charge.