Preaching to the spirits in prison

Richard Noll created quite a stir some years ago when he claimed that the Jungians were a bunch of sun-worshipping, neo-pagan cultic crackpots, and that Jung believed himself to be the Aryan Christ (of all people). These claims are made in Noll's notorious books "The Jung cult" and "The Aryan Christ". Regardless of what one may think of Noll's wilder claims, Jung has always fascinated real neo-Gnostics and New Age believers. I don't think that's a co-incidence. "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" shows Jung's worldview to be pantheistic, animistic, Gnosticizing and opposed to Christianity as traditionally conceived. Even his scientific pretensions are similar to the "scientism" of the later New Age.

The author of "The Gnostic Jung", Stephen Hoeller, is pro-Jung while interpreting the old man in a decidedly and explicitly Gnostic fashion. To Hoeller, Jung was a modern Gnostic, period. The book is published by Quest Books, the publishing arm of the Theosophical Society Adyar. Since it contains positive references to Madame Blavatsky, I suppose Hoeller is a member of TS Adyar.

The book contains the full text of "Seven Sermons to the Dead", the most explicitly Gnostic work of Jung, written under the pseudonym Basilides (the real Basilides was a Gnostic teacher in ancient Alexandria). According to "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", Jung's house in Switzerland was at one point haunted by the ghosts of deceased crusaders (!!). The restless spirits were not amused, and in order to calm them down, Jung wrote "Seven Sermons to the Dead". Satisfied, the ghost found peace and evaporated without further ado. Apparently, this story is supposed to be taken literally...

The sermons are quite brief, and the rest of Hoeller's book is an attempted exegesis of their contents and their baffling references to Abraxas, the Pleroma, the Star, and so on. I think Hoeller succeeds quite eminently in this endeavour. I don't like the Gnostics and I find Jung weird in the extreme, but I don't doubt that his "analytical psychology" was a kind of Gnosticism adapted to the modern world. In that sense, I feel a certain sympathy for the aims of the sun-worshipping, neo-pagan, cultic crackpot Stephan H. Hoeller.