Seven Sermons to the Dead

Definition

The Seven Sermons to the Dead are seven short Gnostic discourses Jung wrote in January 1916, over three evenings, during an episode he describes as a haunting of his own house. He had them privately printed, signed them with the name of the second-century Gnostic Basilides, gave copies away by hand, and never included them in his Collected Works. They are the only part of the Red Book material he circulated while alive.

Deep Understanding

The sermons are spoken to the dead, who arrive in the opening line having come back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. That is the frame and it is not decoration: the audience is people who went looking in the sanctioned place, found nothing, and have returned with the question still open. Anyone reading the text is, structurally, one of them.

What follows is a seven-step sequence, and it is an instruction rather than a poem.

I establishes the two-term cosmos: the Pleroma, fullness and nothingness at once, and Creatura, everything distinct. The duty of the creature is to distinguish, because indistinction is dissolution. II introduces the sun-god and the devil as a pair, and then puts Abraxas above both — the effective god, who speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time. III refuses to soften Abraxas: it is the brightest light and the darkest madness in one operation. IV dismantles monotheism into a working polytheism of psychic powers. V turns from cosmos to human life and sets spirituality and sexuality as the two daemons that possess the person rather than being possessed by them. VI names them — the serpent and the white bird — and refuses to let either be suppressed. VII ends where it must: at the single star that is a person's own god and goal, at immeasurable distance, unshared.

The intellectual weight of the text is the polarity problem. It is not a devotional work and it offers no comfort. It insists that a god defined as purely good cannot account for the world, that wholeness is not moral improvement, and that the individual must end up alone with something that belongs to nobody else. That is why Jung hid it. Everything he later published in the careful language of psychology — the Self, the integration of the shadow, individuation — is present here in the naked mythological form he had actually received it in, and he knew exactly how it would read.

In the Red Book manuscript the sermons close the third part, Scrutinies, and the voice speaking them has been changed: in the original journal entry Jung himself speaks, but in the transcription the speaker is Philemon.

In Practice

Read the first sermon slowly and stop at the instruction to distinguish. Then apply it to one thing today. Take a state you are in — restless, resentful, flat — and refuse the single word for it. Find the two opposed things inside it instead: the wanting and the refusing, the grief and the relief. The sermon's claim is that you do not resolve them; you hold them apart and stay yourself between them. Ten minutes is enough to find out whether that is a metaphor or a description.

The Voice of Pleroma

"The dead in these sermons are not ghosts. They are every part of you that went to the approved place, asked the approved question, got the approved answer, and came back unsatisfied — and has been standing at the door ever since, waiting for you to say something true."