Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916)
Presented on: Thursday, July 16, 1987
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Alchemical Core of C. G. Jung's Work (1916-1956)
Presentation 3 of 13
The Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916)
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 16, 1987
Transcript:
The date is July 16 1987. This is the third lecture in the series of lectures at Philosophical Research Society by Roger Weir on the Alchemical Core of Jung's Work. Tonight's lecture is on The Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1916.
I'm going to put a couple of shorthand rules of thumb before you. Which we will use from time to time. One of them is Chinese experience. We would normally say Chinese thought but I think advisedly Chinese experience. We have in our tape catalog some seventy lectures on Daoism which I've done over the years. And my mentor Kyushu was in quite excellent in these fields. To understand the Dao by yin and yang is rather clumsy. It's probably a better attack to take a process approach. and in Daoism there is a five phase process which forms a completed ecological movement of the Dao. And this is reflected in its stadia, in its stages as five elements or five directions. Or any number of Penta archetypal qualities which permeate Chinese civilization.
They articulate historical source for the enunciation of this five fold process is in Lao Tzu in the Dao De Jing. I believe it's the 38th chapter. It may be the 41st. Somewhere after the the beginning of the second part as they say. Although we know from a early copy of the Dao De Jing which was found in a tomb, the Ming Wei tombs just a few years ago, that the Dao De Jing began with the 37th chapter and not with the first. So that the best way to read the Dao De Jing is actually from the middle to the end and then from the beginning to the middle. That that was the old should we say ancient form and sequence. So what I'm giving to you would have originally appeared very close to the beginning of the work in 3rd century B.C. Chinese understanding.
In the first phase there's an undifferentiate Dao, which if you wish to give it a designation per cognate manipulation a zero will do. Then there is the 1. And the 1 begits the 2. And you can follow this numerically quite easily. And the two begits the 3. And the 3 begtts the 10,000 things or multiplicity if you will. And the 10,000 things, the multiplicity, returns back. Or as we might say today factors back into the dao without leaving anything left over. There are no carryovers. Man occupies the third of these stages or phases. He is the two. And it is his triadic creative capacity which creates the 10,000 thing. Which creates the world of multiplicity. Which if he does not know he has origins. If he is not in accord with the dao. He will misuse his triadic creative capacities and make a multiplicity which does not factor back into the dao at all. But begins to lard up the situation and everything backs up.
The way in which man in an a Daoist energy ecology participates naturally with the dao is to give his own participation a kind of a zero quality. In the sense not of the original zero but in the sense of an approximation where he does not overemphasize anything. But everything has its emphasis in accordance with its nature. and so it's, a it's a man's zero. And by this you have an ecology which reads something like zero one zero three. And his tragic creative phase will be very much in accord with the one. With the sense of unity. The three-in-one. And from this triadic balance with unity his creative capacities produce not just a multiplicity but produce an infinity. There's no end. There's no limitation. And it's because of this infinite mess. That it that all of it is able to quote factor back into the dao. Back into the zero. and so man participates in this ecology of energy, this flow, by his understanding of his place in the flow. He does not control it. What he controls is the ability to not interfere with it. That is within his domain. And the ability not to interfere with it is largely a matter of balancing.
And we'll say that for Jung tonight in The Seven Sermons to the Dead he gets his first vision of not to strive for the good but to strive for the completed balance of all equivalences. So that what is manifested there is eternity. Is the void as Facilities(?) will say. And are any particular thing of his personal design. Of his individual choice. And yet paradoxically his individuation resides exactly in his ability to maintain and create this balancing within himself.
But for men in the Western pyche there is a complication which arises which does not arise in the Chinese mind. In the Western mind not only do we have a ultimate balance between say a polarity like yin and yang. Which we could designate a **inaudible a few words**. Not only the basic polarity but there is the context of A. And the context of not A. One not only has a polarity, one has a pair of polarities. So well there might be completeness in balancing a polarity there is perfection and balancing the pairs of polarity. And that this quaternary structure here's the equilibrium of the Western psyche. Which expresses itself as Jung found very often in mandala like shapes. Which express not his ego but his self. And so in this sense then Western men may participate in a Daoist ecology but rather in a very distinctive way which does not appear in the Chinese mind.
For Jung, he always stressed the need to understand that the structure of the psyche has a historical correlate. The way in which we developed has left its moraines, as it were, in the shaping the texture, the structure of our psyche. So that one can go back in historical time and find a correlate going in to one's psyche, in terms of its structure.
This quaternary form of the psyche is first expressed in Western history by Pythagoras around 500 B.C. the Dougterjane(?) written about 500 B.C. So that if one wish to do a comparison here of the Eastern mind and the Western mind Lao Tzu and Pythagoras would be very good candidates. In Pythagoras there were great lists of opposites. In fact the classic list which has come down to us through Aristotle was that there were ten pairs. But the basic polarities in Pythagorean thought are a pair. There is the limited and the unlimited. The odd and the even. There's the...there are the odd. And they, the even and if nothing there is the limitied to the context today is the context of nothing. The Chinese yin and yang understanding of polarity is distinct from the Pythagorean, was also present in classical Greece. And was expressed by Heraclitus in the fragments. All we have of Heraclitus are the fragments. Sometimes they're called the cosmic fragments. There's a good addition that was done by Cambridge University Press recently a $30 paper back. In Heraclitus as in Chinese thought, as exemplified by Lao Tzu, the polarities interpenetrate. So that the balance does not come from a quaternary structure but it comes from a interaction between the two. The seed of the one is contained in the expressiveness of the, of the other. And then the other at it's quintessential core is the seed of the first.
In Jung's thought, which is extremely sophisticated, both of these lines of development. Both of these ethical sequences of consciousness come together. And the significance of Jung in a vast overview. Not in just the picture of the last hundred years or five hundred year, years. But in the last several thousand years. The significance of Jung's thought is that both east and west continuum's of the sequencing of consciousness come together and integrate. So that it's very difficult from a strictly Western epistemological approach to understand Jung. And it's very difficult for someone who is afine to Asian thought, especially East Asian thought or Chinese thought. Or the way in which Buddhist thought was developed in China, Chan or Zen thought. It's very difficult for them to understand the scientific aspects of Jung's thought.
Because the Pythagorean tradition comes down to us and eventually becomes for us the understanding which we have in science. And there are many scientists today who would be very glad to look upon Pythagoras as an early companion along the way. His stressing, for instance, that they the esoteric inner understanding of the way in which the form of reality matures requires a mathematical consciousness. That while the other initiatives are the acousmaticee(sp?). The inner initiatives are the mathematicee(sp?). and through this the development of Western thought has actually blossomed in a science which we recognize as being mathematical in expression, Pythagorean in structure and tone. And the self that works in that expressive mode that can use that language naturally for its own structure is recognizable in that language. Is this quantinary self whose fundamental, esoteric polarities are the limited and the unlimited. The odd and the even.
But on the other side. Or what seemed to be forever on the other side. On the other side from science was the the mystic. The visionary. Or as we would see now the Daoist. And what becomes a prototype for Jung, the synthesizing cord of his thought will be the mystical science which has developed in both East and West in an odd centuries millennia long exchange called alchemy. Because alchemy is both the science based upon nature and a mysticism based upon art. And it's to Jung's credit from here until ideas fade that he was able in himself to anneal these two traditions. Which had crossed several times in history. And it either produced unbelievable mystics or scientists who were so essoteric that they were unable to talk to anyone in their own time.
The first Western thinker to broach this confluence of these two traditions was Roger Bacon in the 1200's. And he was at least 500 years ahead of his time. And there wasn't anyone he could talk to.
Another individual who was cognizant of these traditions and their, their complementation on a large scale was Liebniz. And he too had almost no one that he could talk to. He was at least 200 years ahead of his time. The binary notation for Liebniz is differential and integral calculus, is quite understandable today. And is preferred and used to that of Newton. And is developed from an acquaintance of the Ye Ching.
But with Jung finally we have an individual who is able to take East and West and bring them together and make a one world. A, a true vision. A man who is cosmopolitan in the sense that he belongs in the whole world. When he was over 40 years old and was letting himself go. he says it was December 12th 1913. He sat at his desk and he consciously let go. And he fell. He fell in the terror of the soul. And he recounts to us in Memories, Dreams and Reflections how this shook him. He, he ended in what seemed to be a sticky darkness. And in this darkness he saw a dwarf standing by some kind of a, of a hole. Some sort of an exit or entrance where ever it was that he had come to. This figure of the, of the dwarf helper in mythological lore in Europe are referred to sometimes as the kabiri. And generally their twin types. But he squeezed by this door figure into this dark tunnel in his psyche. And going through the darkness he came out into an opening where there on a ledge was a glowing red crystal. And in his recounting he pulled the crystal lose and where's it been it left a penetration. Not so much a hole but a penetration into a flowing stream which was under the darkness wherever he was. Underground, that underground. It was an underground which was deeper than the underground which he had gone to. Below the personal underground there was another underground. And even more fantastic.
And in this flowing stream he saw a sequence of four images. The first one was a blond-haired man with a head wound floating by. The second was an enormous black scarab. And the third was a Rising Sun coming out of the water whose light was so dazzling that his response was to try and put the crystal back in the hole. And at that point the hole began to gush blood. Thick blood for what he seen...said seemed an interminable time. These four symbolic images are a forerunner, a pre-see as it were. A visionary looming as Melville would say. Of the of the image of the wholeness.
I'd like to go to the Seven Sermons to the Dead right away. And then we'll take a break and then I'll come back and, and give you some more. And I'm trying to give you an in this lecture and the next one some basics along with the material. Some, some basics in the sense that no one or frequently no one tells us. Just some of the basic qualities of thought which we use unconsciously all the time. And yet with, when we recognize the precision it helps us to distribute, as it were, our attention. It's like instead of walking on deep snow and sinking in we put snowshoes on and we walk on the surface. We're still in the woods. We're still in the snow. But we know how to move. we're mobile under the conditions because of a distribution of our attention. We're not going to sink into the images and get stuck there. but we're going to be able to be movable among them. So that they form instead of a trap they form a landscape. Which allows us then to exercise instead of our terror and fear at this. Or our ecstasy at being there. To exercise that third function which complements both terror and ecstasy. That third function, that third way, to transcend. and that is the way of wisdom. Or if you like to use the term in the bhagavad-gita a kind of a steady wisdom. Stithpragya. A steady seeing. And if this steady seeing which is the refining fire in alchemy.
We turn now to The Seven Sermons to the Dead. Jung records in Memory Streams and Reflections that the day before and the day of writing this that there was such a heavy oppressive atmosphere in his house that no one could stand him. His son and four daughters, his wife, the servants, Jung himself. Everyone felt a heavy, dank, humid oppression psychically in the house. And Jung said that it was the sort of situation where the spirits were packed to the walls and lined up at the doors. Like a description I heard Ray Bradbury once say about why he wrote. He said it grabs you by the back of the neck and won't let you go until you go over the typewriter and sit down and write. Then it'll let you go. And so Jung sat at his desk like he had done some years before to let go to go into a psyche. This time he let go to put it on paper. It is a different step. The first step is a symbolizing process. The second step is an artistic process. The first step in symbolizing one is still in the psyche. And one's only parallel that's there is nature. But in art one has an interesting array of parallels. One has the symbolic parallel and one has the natural parallel. But something yet a fourth dimension which hasn't yet occurred but which will be science. And that man at the stage of being able to sit down and work on it in some medium transcends the psyche by the sheer doing of it. And that this quality of transcending is not so much a metaphysical space but a life energy. Life doesn't want you to think about it but to live it. Just like that. So the artist when he does his work he is alive with a capital L. Or I guess a guess with a capital A.
So here's the, the first of the seven sermons. And these dead in here according to Jung are literally those spirits that had packed his house. Those presences. and what they reveal to him first, the dead came back from Jerusalem where they found not what they sought. They came back from Jerusalem. They came back from a religious focus that should have been of service. It should have been satisfactory. Jerusalem the holy city. But these dead were unable to find for themselves what they needed there. so they, they prayed let me in. Let them in. and besought my word and thus I began my teaching. Who is this at their beseeching? The figure identified himself as Basilides. And in fact the subtitle of the works Seven Sermons of... Septum Sermones ad Mortuos by C.G. Jung. The subtitle is the seventh service to the Dead written by Basilides in Alexandria, the city where the East touches the West. Or toucheth. We have to get the biblical tone here. Toucheth.
And notice here that it's, it's not that East meets West. Most commentators are speaking in that way. But it's not East meets West, it's that the East touches the West. This is a motion of let's put it into prosaic terms for a moment. This is a movement of the unconscious to the conscious. Of the unknown East coming to touch the known West in a particular place in this visionary eye. But that the visionary eye for Jung is a hearing of the ear of the voice of the figure. The figure is Basilides in Alexandria. Basilides. There is a historical Basilides who flourished in the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. This was a time when Rome was at its fabulous height. The Antonine age was the is the classical Rome that you always think of. Monumental, monolithic and and everywhere. Around 117 to maybe around 160 A.D. So that Basilides is born probably around 80 A.D. and lives on somewhere to about 150 or so A.D. So that his lifetime falls say in between that of someone like Saint Luke and Clement of Alexandria. In between there.
And Basilides, we'll talk a little bit more about them after the break, functions in Alexandria. the city where the East touches the West. Touches the West. So that we're moving not to Jerusalem but to Alexandria.
And Basilides begins as teaching, "Harken I begin with nothingness." Nothingness is the same as fullness. So that you have a basic, if I can use the term here advisory, a basic equivalence. It's like a logical equivalence that zero and infinity equate out logically. They can be used interchangeably. In any statement where you can use zero you can use infinity also. And it's logically preserves its soundness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full.
And you can see here that this is an Eastern, this is an Asian message. This is an understanding which is would be Anathema in Jerusalem. Which is not really very well known in Alexandria. And so when Basilides delivers this the dead are extremely restless. In fact at the end of the first sermon or at the begin..rather at the beginning of the second sermon. "In the night the dead stood along the wall and cried. We would have knowledge of God. Where is God? Is God dead?" And at the beginning of, at the end of the second sermon in the beginning of the third, "The dead now raised a great tunnel for they were Christians. And then like mists arising from a marsh the dead came near and cried speak further unto us concerning the Supreme God." And at the end of the third sermon, "Now the dead how old enraged for they were unperfect." And then at the beginning of the fourth, "The dead filled the place murmuring and said tell us of gods and devils a cursed one."
So you can see that they the background. the chorus of this monologue, restless spirits. Personages. Figures. Figurations. Who at one time were alive in some flow of meaning but now fin themselves outside of that flow of meaning. So that their configurations are no longer. No longer have meaning. So that they're functioning no longer has an ability to generate not only meaning but to confirm that meaning and establish a truth. And that further without that meaning and that truth there is no life. And thus they are dead.
The speaker then capitalizes for Jung on the page. The word Pleroma was written as a capital. "The nothingness or fullness we named the Pleroma. Therein both thinking and being ceased since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is for he would then be distinct from the Pleroma and would possess qualities which would distinguish him has something distinct from the Pleroma."
Now you remember last week where we had that diagrahm of that magical energy. And on the individual form seeking to address itself to that magical cloud. To try and have some relationship. To try and build some relationship. And that the bridging that relationship was the form, the functional form, by which the psyche precipitates itself out of that need. Out of that basic confrontation if you like. That the development of the psyche structures itself in that play. Or in that interplay as we should say.
So Pleroma is capitalized. And then the second word that's capitalized is Creatura. Using the, the definite A on the end. Not just a creature but Creatura. The the creature as the thing. The definiteness. So as set up here a basic fundamental polarity between Pleroma and Creatura. the kind of exclusive as we'll see when we come back from the break. The kind of exclusive polarity whose expression in the Western mind can only be delivered by analogies. And in fact the Western mind ever since the classical Greeks. Not only Pythagoras and Heraclitus but then finally another pre-Socratic thinker named Parmenides. And it's the Pythagorean, the Heraclitian, the Parmenian logical ideas that come together in Aristotle. And give the form, the precipitated form, of the Western mind. And the quality in Parmenides, the basic polarity of mind in Parmenides is that what is, is and what isn't, isn't. And there is no meeting. There's no inner penetration whatsoever. And there's also no equivalences that can be established. there's a radical break.
Here Bastilidies is delivering the Parmenidian radicalness that Creatura has nothing to do with Pleroma. And that a man who sees himself as Creatura has no contact with the Pleroma whatsoever. He is alienated from his reality. But that within his Creatura uncontaminated by his creaturaness is his Pleromatic spirit. His pneumatic self. And what does it wish to do? It wishes to go home. And so it, it has this tendency to want to go. Go somewhere. But there is nowhere for it to go where the Pleroma is not. And so this need to go. This pilgrimage. This pressure. This compulsion. To, to, to grow. To make a trip. To develop has to be transformed instead of going somewhere else to be here in a Pleromatic way. So the basic transformation is to transform this linerial motion to go out somewhere else to a kind of emotion which establishes a present here. So instead of arrows of intentionality, I'm going to have this. This is what I need. I need to go to the Yucatan with Don Eduardo and sit in the caves, etc etc. That all of that is fictitious in the sense that what the Pleromatic self needs is a circumambulation around where you are in order to establish a sense of presence here. that it/s not objective in any Creatura sense but is objective only in that Pleromatic completeness.
But Jung is not ready in 1916 to understand that. He couldn't understand that then. It's very difficult to understand that. and it's due to his writings and his works that some of us have been able to understand this before age 90.
So Basilides then gives him a third capitalized word. In fact it's a phrase of two words latin priciple Principium Individuationis. The individuation principle. The, the way as it were by which this individualization takes place. that being present, bringing all of your, your arrows of intentionality to circle round like the wagons settling down for the night and then they enter fire going to work. That principle. this is the principle as the essence of the creature. It's the essence of the creature. Notice now that this sets up in the long range, it sets up that the the principle of the creature has within it the seed of the other. If one can keep oneself here long enough what occurs in the very center of oneself is that magical cloud which begins to generate right in the center of oneself. And by letting that happen. By accenting to this process of letting that unknown penetrate to oneself, at the same time in the center of that magical cloud begins to form a complementary essence of oneself. And Jung will see and understand finally that this, this manifestation will be the soul, the anima. Begins to establish itself in the unconscious. And that the Animus complement in consciousness is this, this presence of willing to let the unknown be here. It can't be worked in. It can't be manipulated. But it is.
So that these three capitalizations then, when you have this kind of polarity, Pleroma and Creatura. And then this process in between them, the principle of individuation. You have a triad.
And to balance that out comes in a fourth, the pairs of opposites. And the fourth capitalisation in the first sermon to the dead is the pairs of opposites. So that the pairs of opposites as a phenomenon, as a highly energized complex procedural phenomena balance out the principle of individuation. Just as Pleromaand Creatura our polarities in the Parmenion sense of being disparate. The principle of individuation and the pairs of opposites are polarities in the Heraclian sense. They interpenetrate. So that Basilides in this vision for Jung is establishing in a very peculiar way a quaternary of a Parmenion pair of polarities and a Heraclian pair of polarities into a quaternary. Which brings together what would be normally incommensurate. They would be called in fact in Aristotelian logic contradictory. But because they were brought together by his spirit guide. But because they were brought together by his spirit guide by Basilidies.
I don't know if the machines need this. They don't have their coffee. Just a minute.
A fifth quality comes into play and is capitalized in this first sermon. That's not in either of these polarities. But is there courtesy of their balance. It is there courtesy of their quaternary harmony. And that fifth essence capitalized is your own being.
Now we'll take a break and let the Machine cool off.
I don't know how, how this is coming across. I hope it's somewhat intelligible. About twenty years ago I was saying to Jakob Needleman in San Francisco. I always had this habit of lecturing he would stare back at the corner of the room. Top ceiling corner. And sometimes you get very excited and you get caught up into it and suddenly you turn and look and see. And he would lose track of what he was saying.
There are some men some good books on Gnosticism. One of the best still is G.R.S. Mead's Fragments of A Faith Forgotten...
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...is still as G.R.S. Mead's Fragments of A Faith Forgotten. Mead is just excellent. He was that woman's secretary, Madame Levansky. And Mead was just excellent. And someday somebody will do a nice little GRS Mead reader or a portable me. All of his private papers and letters and diaries and journals are in Tacoma Washington at the Theosophical Lodge there. Amazing world isn't it. The section on Basilides in Alexandria, probably around page 118 and then around page 252-253. And you can look that up for yourself.
You might pay attention to the little section, the 2 page, 3 page section on Apelles. He was a very important Gnostic. Not so much for his for his historical lineage but for the archetype the figure which he was. He's the wise old man with the young girl. who for Jung was Filamen(?) but in history his name was Apelles. And he lived in Alexandria. And he lived there just at the close of Basilides life and on into Clement of Alexandria's life. And these, these were great figures now in Alexandria.
It's like if you, if you read a 20th century history of Los Angeles you can get an idea of the popular Los Angeles. But if you know that there was such a figure as Manly Hall there it adds that kind of lightning. and you can see that some people grew up and matured in a way which they wouldn't have in terms of Hollywood. The teeth(?) of a real magician
So Apelles is is like that. And his companion was a little, was a young woman. Jung means a girl. That's the old Edwardian Englishman. He means somebody in their mid-20s. Her name was Philomena. Philomena. And Philomena was a natural seer, visionary. And she could see. And so Apelles with his wisdom could interpret. And so together they make a very formidable pair. Another pair that was like that later on in Alexandria. Just to show you how the archetype manifests. Was a Theon of Alexandria and his daughter Hypatia. Theon was one of the great mathematical minds. And his daughter Hypatia was one of the great spiritual visionaries. And she was a very great teacher. Some of her students went on...Synesius. Bishop Synesius was one of her prized students. There's a book on him at the University of California Press just published a couple of years ago. But it's an area that we don't usually hear too much of. But there are figures or persons or groups of persons who constellate from time to time. and who are there. and who are those kinds of figures. And so the old man and the young woman are that kind of a constellation. It's an archetypal pair.
So there's this book by Mead. And there's a new book called Gnosis The Nature and History of Gnosticism by Kurt Rudolph from East Germany. And was at Santa Barbara and then went back for some reason. it's in paperback. But there are some limitations here. Mead is first and foremost a gentleman who knows that these are all true. Everything that he's investigating is in some way true. And is essential to the spiritual quality of the night. And for professor Rudolph he's a scholar and the material is to be sorted out and understood as best as can be. And so he has a different criteria. So with Mead and Rudolph together you have a nice blend.
Some of the material that I'm presenting to you is very difficult to, to read and understand without some study. If some of you are interested this little book Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought by G.E.R. Llyod. Published by Cambridge some years ago. I think it's in paper bound now. It has quite adequate section. I outlined for you chapter two and I was going to present it to you. But we we just we don't have time. I'll bring this kind of material back because we need to understand it.
The basic overall form which is like a structural prototype for Jung's self is as follows. You have, you have a polarity where the the two elements in the polarity are radically disconnected. They don't have any relationship whatsoever. It's not only that they're mutually exclusive but that there's no interface. This is a gnostic polarity. That is to say those who can deal with this deal with this through gnosis and not through episteme. Not through an epistemological approach. But through a gnosis so that it's a Gnostic polarity. The Parmenidean polarity is Gnostic. What is, is and what isn't, isn't. They don't ever meet. They're not even in the same.
The other polarity the Heraclian is similar to and cognate with, it's almost like a kissing cousin to Daoism. The inner penetration of the yin and yang. So you have a Gnostic polarity and you have a Daoist polarity. But they are held together in a quaternary which is Pythagorean. So that that the overall strategic structure is scientific. Mathematical. Numerical. Pythagorean. But that they the working elements in the quaternary are Gnostic and Daoist. And it's such an odd combination that nobody before Jung had enough background and development to put that particular recipe together. No one ever baked that cake before him. That is a very hard cake to bake. You can't get those ingredients in usual places. Only in Alexandria and places like Basil can you find that.
And the missing ingredient as we'll see for Jung was the clarification of Daoism. That came as a shock to him because as soon as he found Richard Wilhelm. Wilhelm who had been, who had been taught the right way as they say. By a Daoist old Daoist master had come out of the western hills from Beijing. And come down and found that Wilhelm was ready and taught him. And as soon as the I Ching was through its writing and the first page proofs the old man passed on. But when Jung comes into contact with Wilhelm it's like the missing piece. He intuitively, he archetypally in terms of the spirit guide knew that that must be it. And yet because he was in a scientific context. Because he is a psychologist. A psychotherapist. Because he's looking also for the historical cognate which must be there. Because this cannot be only true for me it must in fact be the way things are, as Lucretius what it says. It's the way things are. And when he found though Wilhelm the confirmation of Chinese alchemical development according to the Dao, he could he could recognize it. It wasn't like Wilhelm introduced something new to him which he didn't know. But Wilhelm introduced something which Jung thought that he was the only one that had any understanding of this. And when he recognized that in Chinese history it had worked its way out, he knew then that the processes that he had developed were true. They were true worldwide and for a long time. And not only does East touch West in Alexandria but in the 20th century the West touches the East back. And there's this tremendous sense in Jung.
In fact we'll see that he thought his life's work was done in the mid 40s. In 1944 and he was ready to leave to exit. And a voice called him back, now there's work yet to be done. And that work was to develop, as we'll see, a culmination of his alchemical work in the great magnum opus the Mysterium Coniunctionis. Which is a what we would call today a world-class alchemical process for achieving individuation in terms of the world's total culture. That the, the planetary man is now possible. Not because he can phone everywhere in the geographical earth. But because his psyche can be integrated in terms of the worldwide history that has actually taken place. In terms of a structure which is really there. Now when the going gets tough at its most desperate universal level these are the ways in which the psyche precipitates out its structure to receive the grace of the real. East, West for all time anywhere.
And so you find that as we go along in this series that more and more Jung realises that in the Seven Sermons to the Dead he's been given a complete vision. but as he says several times in this writings he didn't know at the time how complete it was. That only later in retrospect, in recognition, recognition, that he realized that this this is a very great teacher. The spirit guide which one is...how can we say this? Infinitely exacting in their honesty. We're used to having approximations and so it's not quite visible to us because it's too exact. And we have to learn to refine ourselves to appreciate that's it exactly. It's like learning that the difference between orange light and red light is so many ten thousandths of an angstrom difference. But that difference makes it orange and not red. It's that kind of exactness.
And so the principle of individuation and the principle of the pairs of opposites form a kind of a Daoist polarity. The Pleroma and the Creatura form a kind of a Gnostic flare polarity. And then in the center the fifth essence, your own being.
So Basilidies at the end of the first lecture, the spirit guide for Jung says to him, "At bottom therefore there is only one striving, namely. The striving after your own being. If he had the striving he would not need to know anything about the Pleroma and its qualities. And yet would you come to your own right goal by virtue of your own being." That is to say the secret, the esoteric secret in the works is that it takes a jump on your part to go feet and heahd and heart into the situation. What we say I think generally in a sort of a Carl Rogers kind of way, it takes a commitment on your part to do this. But again what we talked about last week is there's a resistance to knowing. Because there's a kind of a swallowing up that happens. And one is unsure.
And then there's the intuition that if you really do this, if you really go through this, it's going to change you. You're not going to be the way you were before. It's going to be different. it's going to be new. And look how hard it took you to get comfortable with the situation you have and you just now made it and everything is going to be up for grabs. so there's all that kind of a skittishness.
In the second sermon, what is delivered here is an archetypal presentation of good and evil in terms of God and devil. And a gnostic overview that beyond this God and devil is an unknown. Who is named then Abraxas. Abraxas. And through the second lecture the emphasis is not so much in God and devil but upon becoming sensitive to Abraxas. "This is a God whom he knew not for mankind forgot it. We named it by its name Abraxas. It is more indefinite still than God and devil."
Then in the third sermon the capitalized word is Life. That what Abraxas delivers is not so much good and evil but life. Life.
Then comes some romantic language which begins to then bring in images of the polarities again. Abraxas is the Sun and at the same time the eternally sucking gorge of the void. The belittling and dismembering devil. So that there's an image of the Sun in the void. And that Abraxas is both the Sun and the void. And the imagery will be amplified that the stars in the sky are like many Suns in an extended void. And then there will be the projections and the amplifications that the devils are in the spaces between the stars and the Gods are in the Stars. but that somehow Abraxas is beyond all of that tapestry and yet here in life. Life with the capital L-I-F-E.
So in the third sermon to the dead were given this about life. And at the end of the third sermon, "Now the dead howled enraged for they were unperfected." That is to say to talk about life in this sense only resonates with those who are balanced in this quaternary way. That if they are just balanced in this, in either polarity, this resolution just raises the tension of that polarity. Either one. But it's the two polarities together that form the quaternary of perfection. Not the polarities of completion or balance but the quaternary of perfection. but the dead are unperfected and so they howl and rage because this increased insight just raises the anxiety level. Because they're still trying to hold on to the balance. and so life, which is energy, energea. we're just shooting more current into into the circuit.
So in the fourth sermon we're given then, in capitalizations, the quaternary again. but this time were introduced to the interpenetrating polarity in this termina, terms, these terms. Here's how it begins, "The dead filled the place murmuring and said tell us of gods and devils. A cursed one." Why is he a curse? You're doing this to us. You're telling us this. It's just making it worse. Which will have its complement later in blessed one. You're telling us this and it's making us better. Both the a cursedness and the blessedness are transferences. Neither of them are real. And both of them have to be dealt with in order for there to be the real.
Here's how Abraxas has come through our Basilidies too Jung to us. "The God sun is the highest good the devil is the opposite. Thus have ye two Gods. But there are many high and good things and many great evils. Among these are two God Devils. The one is the burning one. The other the growing one." The burning one is Eros capitalized. Who have the form of flame. Flame giveth light because it consumith. Now this is a very powerful image.
The image of the consuming flame as a divinity. The first time that it occurs in in world history is in Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. I think it's, it's near the beginning of Deuteronomy. When Moses is sure now that the people can go into the Holy Land that it's all prepared. But he knows he can't go in. He has to give a farewell speech to the people. And at the apex of his advice to them he says to them, you have been led out of Egypt as if out of a furnace. Remember that the Lord, your God, is a consuming fire. So that Eros, the flame, here the flame give light because it consumith. The growing one is they and this is capitalized
The growing one is the tree of life. "It budith as it groweth. It keepeth up living stuff. Eros flameth up and dieith. But the tree of life growtheth with slow and constant increase through unmeasured time." The tree of life.
Eros is like a consuming flame. The tree of life is like a refining flame. They're, they're related. But in their relationship there's also a development. Good and evil are united in the flame. Good and evil are united in the increase of the tree. Both. In their divinity stand life and love opposed. Innumerable as the host of the stars is the number of gods and devils. Each star is a of God. And each space that a star filleth is a devil. But the empty fullness of the whole is the Pleroma. The operation of the whole is Abraxas. to whom the only, only the ineffective standeth opposed.
Four is the number of the principle gods as four is the number of the world's measurements. So now here's, here's the quaternary again in the fourth sermon to the dead. But here's how its stated this time, "One is the beginning that God's Son. Two is Eros for he bindeth twain together in out spreadeth himself in brightness. Three is the tree of life for it filleth space with bodily forms. Four is the devil for he openeth all that is closed." So now you've got some very powerful imagery in here.
What comes after that imagery is sermon five. And sermon five begins this way. Notice that whereas in the beginning of the third sermon or at the end of the second just before the beginning of the third sermon. The dead now raised a great tunnel for they were Christians. Now the dead mocked and cry teach us to love the church and Holy Communion. That's, that in Basilides. In the figure, the archetypal figure of Basilides in Alexandria, who is the spirit teacher of Jung. There is a Christianity but is not the Christianity of church history. But it is a Christianity of the Holy Communion. It's a very peculiar combine here. And the only way to get a a sense of this is that these, these are now like incommensurates. there is a Christianity which is in commensurate with the church. It's like a Permedion polarity. They don't have anything to do with each other whatsoever. but that that polarity is not able to be entertained unless there is a balancing polarity that comes into play here.
And now it's going to be given a different stylization. It was Eros in the Tree of Life. Now it's going to be given a different stylization. The world of the Gods is made manifest in spirituality and in sexuality. Eros and the Tree of Life, sexuality and spirituality. The celestial ones appear in spirituality. The earthly in sexuality. "Spirituality conceiveth and embraceth. It is woman like and therefore it is called mater coalescence, the celestial mother. Sexuality in gendereth and creativeth. It is man-like therefore we call it Palos, the earthly father. The sexuality of man is more of the earth. The sexuality of women is more of the spirit. The spirituality of man is more of heaven it goeth the greater. The spirituality of woman is more of the earth it goeth to the smaller. Lying and devilish is the spirituality of the man which goeth to the smaller. Lying and devilish to the spirituality of the woman which goeth to the greater. Each must go to its own place."
So you can see here that in the fifth sermon there is a resolution coming up. But the resolution is very difficult to actually live. He says, "No man therefore escapeth these demons. We shall look upon them as demons. And as a common task and danger a common burden with which life has laid upon you. This is life for you also and it is a common task and danger. As are the gods and first of all of terrible Abraxas." So there's an oddness here. a paradox here. That while the stability is individual the practice of that individuality is a common pursuit. All men and women. Mankind. That it's, its practicality in life is most improbable for an individual to actually be able to do this. And so there's an odd paradox here. so that life while it is individual in its structure, it actually manifests historically in terms of a commonality. So there's a collective quality to the psyche of the individual. in it and it's most amplified development and also at its deepest base.
So and this is very important later on for, for Jung's understanding not only of the place of the coniunctio and individual development. but for the sanity of the world. The sanity of the world. it is not a political solution at all. Political solutions have nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with individuals who are real in their, in themselves.
So Abraxas is presented in this terrible overall paradoxical quality. And Basilides then cautioning Jung, "Man is weak. therefore is communion indispensable. If your communion be not under the sign of the mother than it is under the sign of the phallus. No communion is suffering and sickness. Communion in everything is dismemberment and dissolution. Distinctiveness leadeth to singleness. Singleness is opposed to communion. But because of man's weakness over against the gods and demons, and they're invincible law is communion needful." So that we'll find. It's just like the, it's just like the alchemical symbol. There's always a twist. There's always coming back. It's never more of the same. you never continue. It's never this circularity. It's always, there's a twist in there. That twist is the transformation. And what governs that transformation is the symbol. And what the symbol transforms is that mythic structure into the energy of magic. And the energies of magic into a workable myth. And that's why the self is a symbol. Because it's able to do that, that double transformation and and have it all work. It all works out.
Here's the end of the fifth sermon. And you can get this beautiful Alexandrian, classical Alexandrian. Almost a bit like the classical hermetic high clarity that you would find say like in The Poimandres. "Communion is death. singleness is height. Right measure and communion purifyeth and preserveth. Right measure in singleness purifyeth and increaseth. Communion gives us warmth. Singleness gives us light. And so you can see them brought together. You can see the two polarities which are brought together into a quaternary. And that what seems incommensurate, the individual and the others, are brought together.
The sixth sermon he goes into the demon of sexuality and the demon of spirituality. He begins it in this way. There's no aside about the dead. There's just this direct introduction and development. "The demon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. It is half human in appearance as thought-desire." It's hyphenated. Appears as thought-desire. "The daemon," and this is spelled, that both are spelled d-a-e-m-o-n. In Greek it means a, an energized presence which comes to you. "The daemon of spirituality descendeth into our soul as the white bird. It is half human and appeareth as desire-thought." The one is thought-desire. The other is desire-thought. So that you can see in this particular polarity, if like Henrick Whytner(sp?) it's like Daoist. It's interpenetrate. It works together. But that that polarity is not capable of engendering a your own being. That polarity by itself participates in ecology of the Dao where you are zero. Your optimally balanced out and and not there. You're in good shape when you're not there. So it needs to be under the aegis of the Pythagorean quaternary. It needs to be balanced out with that Parmenion, Gnostic polarity. When you add those two together, those two incommensurate. It's like the bhagavad-gita says, when you add fire and iron together it doesn't seem like they should go together. When they do it's something else. Something else. that is real. That is your own being.
In the seventh sermon Basilides is mediated by this opening paragraph and by the closing paragraph. The opening paragraph is like a benediction. Jung wrote it in three days. Wrote the book in three days. And the opening paragraph is like a benediction for, for the person. It's like a benediction for the heart. saying it's okay. The closing paragraph is a benediction of the purified mind and so it's incomprehensible. It's an anagram, an anagram motto, which has four lines of vowels and consonants' just run together. And I'll talk just briefly about about that.
First of all though the opening benediction to the heart, which needs to be understandable. "Yet when night was come the dead again approached with lamentable mean. And said there is yet one matter we forgot to mention, teach us about man." Basilides, "Man is a gateway through which from the outer world of gods, demons and souls ye passed into the inner world." Man is not a thing, he's a gateway. He's a threshold. He's a portal.
Which is as we'll see in the Dream Seminars next week, which has a very odd kind of a tone. Because we usually think of, for instance, the term which is used in analytical psychology, the persona. And everyone knows that it's a mask. But the persona is not a mask of consciousness it is a mask of unconsciousness. Of the collective unconsciousness at that. So man is not his, his role that he's playing. He's not they the, the state thing which one can point to. A human being is in fact a gateway just like the persona, which is an element of the collective unconscious. That's who he really is.
"Through which from the outer world of gods and demons and souls ye pass into the inner world. Out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and transitory is man. Already is he behind you and once again you find yourselves in endless space. In the smaller our innermost infinity. An immeasurable distance standeth one single star in that Zenith. This is the one god of this one man. This is his world. His Pleroma. His divinity. In this world is man Abraxas, the creator and the destroyer of his own world. This star is the God and goal of man. This is his one guiding God. In him goeth man to his rest. Toward him goeth the long journey of the soul after death. In him shine it forth as light all that man bringeth back from the greater world. To this one God man shall pray. Prayer increases the light of the star. It casteth a bridge over death. It prepared life for the smaller world and aswaygeth the hopeless desires of the greater. When the greater world waxeth coal burnth the star. Between man and his one garth god there standeth nothing. So long as men can turn his eyes away from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas. Man here, God there. Weakness and nothing here, there eternally creative power. Here nothing but darkness and chilling moisture, there holy Sun."
Then the coda, "Whereupon the dead were silent and ascended like smoke about the herdsman fire, who thought the night kept watch...who through the night kept watch over his flock."
Then the anagram. And its not readable. I mean it is readable but it doesn't have...the words are run together. They're trilled together. The syllables. But what's distinctive about the anagram is its form. The first and the third lines of the four lines are of the same length. And are very close in syllabic intonation. The second line is a syllable longer. And the fourth line is two syllables or four syllable shorter than the second line. So you'd have an odd kind of a structure here. If you were able to read this and pronounce it the incantation would have a good particular quality. If you have a quaternary which is expressed in a stanza of four lines and you take a syllable, one syllable, off the fourth line that stanza read then in two couplets that are not quite even in measure. the second one is one syllable shorter. And it sets up a rhythm, a reverberation, which we call syncopation. If you leave two syllables off of the fourth line instead of syncopation. If you get into that rhythm. Into that vibration. Instead of syncopation you have a kind of, a kind of an interjection statement which is characteristic of only one distinctive kind of poetry. Its distinctive of Dionysian ecstasy. Instead of syncopation it's a canalypsis. Where there's a fee of fanty quality to it. The anagram at the end of the seventh sermon of the dead is like a double canalypsis. It's like just being able to barely shout some kind of a term into the astonished wonderment.
Well we'll come back next week and go to work on the next stage.
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