Basilides

Definition

Basilides was a Christian Gnostic teacher who taught in Alexandria in the first half of the second century, most probably under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (c. 120–145 CE). He is the source of the Abraxas doctrine and of a cosmos of 365 heavens. Almost nothing he wrote survives; we know him almost entirely through the churchmen who set out to refute him — and through the fact that Jung signed his own most dangerous text with Basilides' name.

Deep Understanding

Basilides is the clearest case in all of Gnosticism of a mind we can only see through its enemies. He wrote a gospel of his own and a twenty-four-book commentary on it called the Exegetica. None of it survives intact. What we have are quotations and paraphrases in Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and Hippolytus — four opponents who do not agree with each other about what he actually taught.

The system attributed to him by Irenaeus runs downward by emanation: the unbegotten Father, then Nous, Logos, Phronesis, Sophia and Dynamis, then 365 ranks of angelic powers, each of which makes a heaven of its own. The lowest rank, nearest to matter, is the one responsible for this world — the Demiurge by another route. And over the whole 365-fold structure stands Abraxas, whose Greek letters total exactly 365. The number is the point: Abraxas is not a being among the heavens but the name of their totality, good and evil included.

That is the piece that outlived the man. It is a deity defined by containing the opposites rather than choosing between them — and it is the single Gnostic idea that European esotericism never quite managed to digest and never quite let go of, surviving for eighteen centuries mostly on engraved gems and amulets whose owners had no idea what the word meant.

Then, in 1916, Jung wrote seven short texts in the middle of a psychic crisis, had them privately printed, and put on the title page: written by Basilides in Alexandria, the city where the East toucheth the West. He did not claim authorship for decades. The choice of name is not decoration. Of all the Gnostic teachers he could have borrowed, he took the one whose central doctrine was a god beyond good and evil — the exact content of what he had just been forced to write down, and the exact reason he could not publish it under his own name in a Europe that was two years into the Somme.

In Practice

Basilides is the patron of everything you know only through its opposition. Notice how much of what you believe about a person, a tradition or a period of your own life reaches you exclusively through the account of someone who wanted it discredited — an ex-partner's version of a family, a teacher's version of a rival school, your own adolescent version of your parents. You are not obliged to rehabilitate any of it. Just mark it: this is a hostile witness, and it is my only witness. Holding that distinction open is what it feels like to actually think.

The Voice of Pleroma

"Everything Basilides taught reaches us through men who were trying to bury him. Assume the same about the story you carry of yourself — most of it was written by the prosecution."