Valentinus and Gnosticism

Excerpts from from C.G. Jung’s ‘Aion’

The mystical experience of the [alchemical] divisio and separatio of the composite… hastens [us] towards the Logos… more quickly than iron flies to the Heracleian stone (magnet).

This magnetic process revolutionizes the ego-oriented psyche by setting up, in contradistinction to the ego, another goal or centre which is characterised by all manner of names and symbols: fish, serpent, monad, cross and so on. The [Gnostic] myth of the ignorant demiurge who imagined he was the highest divinity illustrates the perplexity of the ego when it can no longer hide from itself the knowledge that it has been dethroned by a supraordinate authority. The “thousand names” of the lapis philosophorum correspond to the innumerable Gnostic designations for the Anthropos…. that indescribable whole consisting of the sum of conscious and unconscious processes… the objective whole , the antithesis of the subjective ego-psyche, i.e the ‘Self’.

This same knowledge [of the psyche] – formulated differently to suit the Age they lived in – was possessed by the Gnostics. The idea of an unconscious was not unknown to them. For instance, Epiphanius quotes an excerpt from one of the Valentinian letters…”in the beginning the Autopater contained in himself everything that is, in a state of unconsciousness.”

Gnosticism was thus a phenomenology of self, a symbolic, metaphorical representation of the Logos – the Logos being an objective psyche beyond, but grasped by or intuited by the subjective personal ego. This was then the origin of ‘transcendental’ Christianity. We know it today as Christian Mysticism which can only be accessed and understood through direct personal experience of the Logos by the self-imposed death of the ego. The overarching message of the Gnostic gospels was one of psychological healing through right living (love and forgiveness), and correct positioning and humbling of oneself in relation to an objective external and superior consciousness evidenced by the beauty, complexity, order and wonder of the Universe – a conscious Universe that expresses the miracle of ‘life’ but moreso expresses reflexivity in that its creation of sapient conscious life leads to the contemplation of itself and thereby self-validates through such conscious recognition.

Such gnostic ‘direct’ communion with God undermined and circumnavigated the Catholic Church’s ‘authority’ ( i.e corporate monopoly) as sole arbiter and interpreter of holy scripture as well as its function as sole dispenser of God’s forgiveness and blessings. No surprises that Gnostics were hunted down and eradicated by the early Church, the modus operandi for almost the next two thousand years: a continual crusade and inquisition against heretics in direct contradiction and inversion of Christ’s message.

In doing so the greatest medieval thought control experiment became the greatest and most profitable medieval Corporation, a complete corruption and materialisation of Christianity. It could be no surprise that such misdirection, grounded in ignorance and materialism produced the Knights Templar Banking Industry that has covertly evolved and still controls the World to this day.