the 'occult' Carl Jung

Some notes from material going around the internet, stemming from a pastoral counselling publication years ago, but interesting:

"In The Jung Cult (1994), clinical psychologist Richard Noll amply documents Jung’s immersion in the paganism and occultism of German culture near the turn of the last century. Although raised in a Christian environment, Jung’s passion focused on the rediscovery of ancient mystery religions that emphasized occultic initiations and sun worship. He immersed himself in the study of mythology and archeology in the hope of finding a primordial wisdom that had been obscured and rejected by the Christian conquest of paganism. Jung resolutely rejected the Christian view that God transcends the creation. Instead, he embraced pantheism, with its god within....
"Mystical paganism was not mere history or theory to Jung. Noll reports Jung’s claim that in 1913 he himself became a god through an extended visualization exercise based on the elements of the initiation rituals of the ancient mystery religions, especially Mithraism. Noll comments that it 'is clear that Jung believed he had undergone a direct initiation into the ancient Hellenistic mysteries and had even experienced deification....'

"Jung also claims to have contacted various spirit entities through his process of 'active imagination,' or directed visualization. By 1916, an entity called Philemon had become Jung’s spiritual guru, and functioned much like the “ascended masters” of the Theosophical movement in Jung’s day. These entities were not occasional visitors with little influence on Jung’s work. According to Noll, these encounters helped shape the whole pattern of Jung’s theoretical work. According to Jung, they had 'their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.' Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, records a haunting of the Jung house, which, he claims, involved paranormal phenomena.

"Through the profound influence of this haunting, Jung wrote a short essay called the Septem Sermones ad Mortuous (the Seven Sermons to the Dead) , under the pseudonym Basilides (a second Century Gnostic writer). In his autobiography, Jung says that 'I was compelled from within, as it were, to formulate and express what might have been said by Philemon. This was how the Septem Sermones ad Mortuous with its peculiar [Gnostic] language came into being.' The sermons are directed at deceased Christian souls who arrive at the Jung household because they have failed to find liberation through the church. The first six sermons present a Gnostic world view, and prepare the dead for the final sermon. Here, Jung tells them to stop seeking salvation outside of themselves, but to look inward toward the 'innermost infinity', which is also referred to as the inner 'Star' or the 'one guiding god.' Having received this revelation, the restless dead disappear and rise into the night sky, apparently to find their own inner stars. Jung’s sun worship and Gnostic predilections appear in full force in this essay...."

The gnostic interpretation regards people who lack an inner life or spiritual awareness as the walking dead so these sermones may be addressed rather to these unenlightened souls.
nekkid