Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 2): Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self by Jung C. G. Hull R. F.C. Adler Gerhard

Author:Jung, C. G., Hull, R. F.C., Adler, Gerhard [Jung, C. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1977-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

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[324] After this digression on the phallic synonyms for the Original Man, we will turn back to Hippolytus’ account of the central symbols of the Naassenes and continue with a list of statements about Hermes.

[325] Hermes is a conjurer of spirits (Ψʋχαγωγóς), a guide of souls (Ψνχoπoμπóς), and a begetter of souls (). But the souls were “brought down from the blessed Man on high, the archman Adamas, … into the form of clay, that they might serve the demiurge of this creation, Esaldaios, a fiery god, the fourth by number.”83 Esaldaios corresponds to Ialdabaoth, the highest archon, and also to Saturn.84 The “fourth” refers to the fourth Person—the devil—who is opposed to the Trinity. Ialdabaoth means “child of chaos”; hence when Goethe, borrowing from alchemical terminology, calls the devil the “strange son of chaos,” the name is a very apt one.

[326] Hermes is equipped with the golden wand.85 With it he “drops sleep on the eyes of the dead and wakes up the sleepers.” The Naassenes referred this to Ephesians 5 : 14: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.” Just as the alchemists took the well-known allegory of Christ, the lapis angularis or cornerstone, for their lapis philosophorum, so the Naassenes took it as symbolizing their Protanthropos Adam, or more precisely, the “inner man,” who is a rock or stone, since he came from the ’, “fallen from Adamas the archman on high.”86 The alchemists said their stone was “cut from the mountain without hands,”87 and the Naassenes say the same thing of the inner man, who was brought down “into the form of oblivion.”88 In Epiphanius the mountain is the Archanthropos Christ, from whom the stone or inner man was cut. As Epiphanius interprets it, this means that the inner man is begotten “without human seed,” “a small stone that becomes a great mountain.”89

[327] The Archanthropos is the Logos, whom the souls follow “twittering,” as the bats follow Hermes in the nekyia. He leads them to Oceanus and—in the immortal words of Homer—to “the doors of Helios and the land of dreams.” “He [Hermes] is Oceanus, the begetter of gods and men, ever ebbing and flowing, now forth, now back.” Men are born from the ebb, and gods from the flow. “It is this, they say, that stands written: ‘I have said, you are gods, and all of you the sons of the most High.’”90 Here the affinity or identity of God and man is explicit, in the Holy Scriptures no less than in the Naassene teachings.

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