Original subtitles

- Yes, I'm gonna talk a bit about what I'm calling

the Hermetic Jung.

Active imagination and the journey through the planets.

And this means I'm gonna be looking at a

central theme in Hermetic philosophy,

hermetic tradition, and seeing

what connections we can make

between it and some of Jung's ideas.

The idea that we can make these connections

shouldn't seem strange because Jung's work

itself, in a very broad sense, you know,

falls under the Hermetic tradition.

And both Jung's work and the Hermetic tradition itself,

I would say, falls under this category of eternal knowledge

that we're focusing on this weekend.

In different ways they both express in some form

some central themes in what we can call

the perennial philosophy.

It's in a very, very broad sense,

and the broadest sense possible means that, you know,

we are not simply physical beings, natural beings,

beings of time and space,

but there's a part of us,

and perhaps the most important part that exists

in some realm beyond.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Jung.

And I love the idea that he has his glasses up there

on his forehead.

The one on the left side is almost over his third eye.

I guess, so this is in a way,

I don't think Jung did this on purpose,

but in a way it's a kind of unconscious.

You could call it a Jungean slip in a way

where he's giving us a sign about looking within,

looking inside, you know, metaphorically inside

our heads.

So Jung has his glasses up there showing us

where we should be looking.

And the journey I'm gonna be talking about,

even though it's the journey through the planets,

is, in reality, an inward journey.

It's a journey within.

It's a kind of journey that Jung taught many of us to take.

I know when I first became interested in this sort of thing

in my teens back in the 1990s, excuse me,

back in the 1970s,

one of the first people I was reading was Jung.

I didn't understand much of it then,

I still don't understand a great deal of it,

but Jung, like myself, and many others I believe,

Jung was the one who sort of showed us

how to look inward.

He certainly showed modern man how to do that.

And the whole idea of inner journeying

is part of the esoteric tradition.

It's part of what we call the Western Inner Tradition,

Western Hermetic Tradition.

In recent times there's been a movement

in some Jungean circles to sort of separate Jung

from this way of seeing him as part of this

Western Inner tradition,

separate Jung from being seen as an esotericist

or an occultist in some way,

emphasize his scientific side,

his more strictly psychological side.

And I think that's all to the good.

I think Jung's very strict, rigorous,

more or less scientific work needs to be recognized.

He was scientific as Freud let's say.

But he also had this other side,

and I think to sort of try and lose this other side,

this esoteric inner occult side of side,

you get kind of a Jung-lite in a way.

Something similar can be said about Emanuel Swedenborg

who more or less I would say is kind of the inspiration

for this conference center here, Purley Chase.

It was started by Swedenborgians.

It's maintained by them.

I've written a small book on Swedenborg

and I've given talks at the Swedenborg Society in London,

and quite a few people come to them,

don't like the idea of seeing Swedenborg

as an occultist in some way.

They don't like the idea of seeing Swedenborg

as having something to do with esotericism

in this sort of thing 'cause they believe

it takes away from his religious significance

and all that.

And I can understand that argument,

but once again I think if you do that

you'd have a Swedenborg-lite

So we have Jung looking into worlds.

And some of the inner worlds

that I'm gonna try to

introduce us to or bring us to today

have to do with what we call the Hermetic tradition.

What is the Hermetic tradition?

What is Hermeticism?

It's the body of knowledge, body of philosophy,

insights and spiritual wisdom

associated with Hermes Trismegistus.

It means "thrice-greatest Hermes".

He's great, great, great.

He's great as a philosopher, great as a sage,

great as a king, great as quite a few other things as well.

And the story goes that Hermes was

given a visionary experience of the eternal mind

of what we can call nous in Greek.

This kind of archetypal mind at large

as Aldous Huxley referred to it,

not specifically the Hermetic version

but in the general sort of sense,

not in any particular mind that my mind or your mind,

but the sort of creative mind behind existence,

behind reality.

And the story is that Hermes,

in a very relaxed state, or his body was quiet,

his senses were quiet.

He suddenly had this vision of the eternal mind

coming to him.

And it was then that he was given this revelation.

Hermes is believed to have been given this

kind of revelation about the true knowledge

of the relations between man, God, and the cosmos.

And he is thought or was thought

to be the author of a series of philosophical,

spiritual, inspirational, and also magical tracks

that have been come to be known

as the Corpus Hermeticum,

the Hermetic body of work basically.

We see him here as an alchemical Hermes.

You have the sun and the moon.

One of the central themes in Hermeticism

as well as in Jung is this bringing together

of the opposites.

This unification of contraries

or holding in the polarities in a kind of

creative sort of tension.

Here's another sort of image of Hermes.

This is much more, this is a much later one that

earlier one was, I forgot exactly what century it's from,

16th to 17th century.

This is an illustration from

Manly P. Hall's classic work,

"The Secret Teachings Of All Ages".

If you're not familiar with it, you should be.

It's one of the great compendiums of esoteric

and inner and Hermetic and kabbalistic and

free masonic and so and so knowledge.

This is an illustration by

someone named Augustus Knapp

who did the illustrations in the book.

And we have Hermes here

and his guise as the Egyptian.

Now, throughout antiquity,

through the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages,

and then especially in the Renaissance,

Hermes was believed to have been

a contemporary of Moses,

or perhaps even older.

He was thought to have existed

at the dawn of time.

He was considered to be a real person,

a real individual.

Subsequently in the early 17th century

through humanistic, scholarly research,

it was determined that the books

making up the Corpus Hermeticum

that had been lost for about a millennium

from late antiquity until they were rediscovered

by a book scout working for Cosimo de' Medici,

the power broker of Florence.

For a long period of time for a millennium, more or less,

these Hermetic books were lost.

A few bits of them turned up here and there

in different places.

There were few scraps of them.

There was one book called the Asclepius

which was known during the Dark Ages

and it's in Middle Ages.

It's sort of a separate text from the main

body of the Corpus Hermeticum.

But Hermes Trismegistus was known during this time.

His name was still known.

It was an anti-conjure with literally.

And when the Corpus Hermeticum

was rediscovered in the Renaissance

and was translated by Marsilio Ficino,

it had an immense impact on the Renaissance.

The Renaissance wouldn't have been

what it was without this input from

Hermes Trismegistus.

And if you're interested in following this line up

you can read a wonderful book by Frances Yates,

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition,

where she traces the rediscovery of the Hermetic texts

and their influence on the Renaissance at the time.

As we know the Renaissance was a time of rediscovery

of ancient works, Greek philosophy.

Plato was another one who was more or less

rediscovered during that time.

Ficino translated Plato as well.

But if we look at Hermes here,

the Egyptian, he obviously has got the pharaoh's

sort of head cap.

He's holding the Emerald Tablet in one hand.

This is the fabled Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus

which is, I guess, the central text in alchemy.

Although the Emerald Tablet itself is not part

of the Corpus Hermeticum.

It was not part of these texts that was rediscovered

by Cosimo de' Medici's book scout and translated by

Marsilio Ficino.

There's no Greek original of the Emerald Tablet

has ever come to light.

The earliest version that we know of is,

appears in the 8th century.

And it's a version by Jabir ibn Hayyan

who's the Arab alchemist who's better known

in this Latinized version as Gerber.

There's also a 9th century version to come out

that was erroneously, it should be to Appollonius of Tyna.

We also see some other motifs that associate

Hermes Trismegistus with Egypt.

There's the Ibis which is the bird

that's associated with him.

There's the dog, faithful,

trustworthy animal.

And you see the pyramids in the background.

He's got one foot standing on Typhon which is this

sort of demon dark character

in Egyptian mythology that Hermes Trismegistus

was said to have defeated.

This is a symbolic sort of side to that.

It's the older animal,

lower nature of ourselves that

the Hermeticist, the magician defeats

and learns how to control

and makes use of.

And he also has in his hands the caduceus

which is Hermes' sort of magic wand.

We can see around that it's a staff

encircled, entwined by two serpents.

And at the top there's this orb with wings.

Even though it's believed that the Corpus Hermeticum

was written by Hermes Trismegistus in the ancient times

we're pretty clear that it was more or less

written in the second or third century in Alexandria,

which obviously still is a city in Egypt.

It was founded by Alexander the Great.

And Alexandria was a fascinating city,

it was a fascinating place at the time because

it's the meeting ground of many, many different

sorts of ideas and cultures and races

and beliefs and religions, much like our own today,

much like our own sort of multi-cultural,

multi-faith time today.

You had a lot of what's called syncretism going on.

The Greeks were very happy to learn about

the Egyptian gods.

The Egyptians were happy to learn about the Greeks.

You also had large Jewish population there,

and a variety, early Christian movement going on as well.

So there was a kind of mash up,

kind of mix up between different deities

and different gods and different ideas.

And the whole idea of Hermes Trismegistus,

Trice Greatest Hermes, was one product of that.

The figure of Hermes Trismegistus is more or less

a kind of amalgam of the Egyptian god Toph

who's the god of magic, the god of writing,

the scribe of the gods, and the Greek god Hermes.

He was a messenger god, also a god of writing,

a good of transition,

a god of crossroads and so on.

Now Jung was well aware of the Hermetic tradition.

He knew about it a great deal,

but he focused on sort of later

developments of it in one sense.

Jung focused mostly on alchemy and the Hermetic tradition.

Alchemy is considered the Hermetic art.

But as I said earlier it isn't a part of the

Corpus Hermeticum.

Alchemy was going on in Alexandria.

And at the time, and there's some evidence

that suggest that some alchemists,

early alchemists in Alexandria knew of the Hermeticists

who were there at the time

and some ideas crossed over between them.

But Jung himself paid more attention it seems

to later developments of Hermeticism.

Most of the books that he

consulted, the works he consulted in his writings

on alchemy tended to come from the 16th

and 17th century.

But he did write an important paper on

an Alexandrian alchemist from the third century,

Zosimos, originally from a city called Panopolis.

And Zosimos had some connection with the

Hermeticists at the time.

He incorporates some Hermetic ideas

into some of his writings about alchemy.

So the alchemists, Hermeticists and also another group,

the Gnostics, were all contemporaries

in this time in the second or third century

in Alexandria.

Again, Jung's great work, one of his last works,

if not his last book, Mysterium Coniunctionis,

if I pronounce that correctly,

published in 1955,

was Jung's sort of magnum opus about alchemy.

And he writes about Hermes in there

but he tends to see Hermes as a kind of trickster figure,

as a kind of trickster god in some way,

and that is a true aspect of it,

of Hermes, one aspect of his character.

But as I'm going to sort of get on to Jung's

whole sort of movement or theme

in Hermetic philosophy that Jung didn't

pay too much attention to.

Again, Jung used many volumes

from Manly P. Hall's library that he collected

and is still available for study at the

Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles,

Manly P. Hall.

The early image of Hermes, as I said,

came from his book.

But this is sort of the essence of Jung's take on alchemy

is this unification of the opposites.

Here we have the lunar queen and the solar king

joining together.

We see the sun and the moon.

It's this bringing together of these opposites.

Although Jung wrote large halfway unreadable texts

about alchemy and a variety of other things,

there's a short paper that he did where he said

what the essence of alchemy was,

and it's something that he called the transcendent function.

And this is where the conscious and the unconscious mind

come together, rather than fighting it out

as they do most of the time, they come together

and they produce something that's

more than either of them.

It was a creative union between the two

and some new thing that wasn't thought of

that wasn't expected comes of this.

And that's very much along the lines of

this alchemical motif that Jung focused on,

the bringing together of the opposites.

In this sense it would be creating the alchemical gold.

And we know that although there were a lot of

alchemists who actually tried to make gold,

I mean, and that does go back to the early days in Egypt,

not only gold, the actual metal that

they were trying to make,

they were trying to make things golden,

they were trying to come up with new ways to

basically make things glitter and shine

and have the appearance of gold.

So there is actually that root of alchemy.

But even as early as this fellow Zosimos,

there's a spiritual aspect that comes into it,

something to do with inner transformation.

and Jung sort of took that and ran with it as it were,

and as we said that's what alchemy was about.

It's about this inner transformation.

It's about making a kind of inner gold.

And this is what comes out of the transcendent function.

And Jung loyalists said that the alchemists were doing

what he was doing that they didn't know

that they were doing that.

They thought they were doing something else.

They thought they were doing these experiments,

manipulating matter,

going through a variety of different operations.

Jung is saying by doing that they were somehow

projecting unconscious material,

projecting what he called the archetypes

onto these operations and experiments.

And they were doing unconsciously

something that Jung believed that he had developed

or was able to somehow formulate consciously.

And this is something that he called active imagination.

We'll get back to that a bit later on.

But essentially active imagination is a way

of consciously inducing this transcendent function.

It's a way of trying to bring unconscious contents

together with the conscious mind.

It's a way of dreaming while awake.

It's a way of having an inner journey.

It's a way of having an inner visionary sort of experience.

Much like the visionary experience I mentioned earlier

in which Hermes Trismegistus was given this revelation

about the truth, the true knowledge of

man, god, and the cosmos.

Another Hermetic art

that Jung was interested in was astrology.

He studied astrology throughout most of his career.

He didn't talk about it much until later in his career.

Jung kept stumm a lot about his interests in

Hermeticism or any other esoteric or occult

kind of practice because he wanted to

protect his standing as a scientist.

In my book, Jung the Mystic,

it's sort of short introductory,

biographical study of Jung

but from this esoteric point of view.

I originally wanted to have a question mark here,

but the publisher thought that would inhibit sales.

So we didn't have that.

But it raises the question was Jung a mystic?

And Jung, throughout hiw whole career,

said he wasn't.

In a very late interview,

he told the interview that anyone

who thinks I'm a mystic is an idiot.

And that would've included quite a few people by that time,

not the least of which was Jung's early mentor

and well friend Sigmund Freud.

So Jung himself argued his whole career

that he was a scientist, he was an imperiasist,

he wasn't doing mysticism,

he wasn't doing the occult,

he wasn't doing philosophy,

he was doing hard kind of science.

The professor doth protest too much I think

because anyone who's familiar with Jung's work knows

that he was in this camp,

he was part of this sort of tradition.

He was a scientist as well,

but he was part of this esoteric sort of tradition.

But as I say Jung is doing astrological charts

for his patients early on.

Though it's much later in his career that he came out

and started talking about it upfront.

And he was very interested in

the idea of the precession of the equinoxes.

As early as 1940 Jung was talking about

the age of Aquarius, the age of Aquarius coming on,

and he predated the hippies by at least

20 years if not more.

He was aware of these changes going on

in the zodiac.

And in a late book called Aion,

it was published in 1951,

he more or less tries to bring together

this idea of the precession of equinoxes which I assume

you're all familiar with.

You know, it's the movement of the zodiac

against the sun rising and we're sort of,

I don't know where we are now.

We're kind of supposed to be in the beginning

or about to be in the beginning of Aquarius.

We're coming out of, what was it?

Aries?

Pieces, sorry.

Coming out of Pieces and all that.

Jung put his ideas about the archetypes,

again, which I'm assuming you know.

These fundamental sort of psychic blueprints

that we're born with.

Jung was a bit ambiguous about where they came from.

Do we inherit them genetically?

Are they part of the brain?

Are they something that's built up over time

after millions and millions and millions

and man have had experience of women

we all inherit that now,

and likewise women for men.

But he also talked about them in a way

that's more in line with some of the Hermetic ideas

where they're kind of these platonic ideals,

they're these kind of fundamental patterns

or structures that exist outside of time and space,

outside of physical reality.

But somehow their influence

is pressed onto it.

Jung was aware of, again,

astrology and he made use of it,

another Hermetic art or idea.

But what I'm gonna talk about now is one that Jung

didn't really pay much attention to,

and I'm actually surprised that he did it.

And it's called the journey through the planets.

Now in this revelation that Hermes Trismegistus

was said to have had by Nous, the Eternal Mind,

among many other things Nous explained

the creation of the world.

And he explained what happens to us

when we're born into the world.

I'm sorry, this is a rather dull, boring

version of this but I just try to get

the clearest kind of picture of it

without a lot of Latin that I can't read

or pronounce accurately.

But this is the old Ptolemaic view of the world,

the Greek astronomer Ptolomy had his vision

of the universe was dominant

until basically Copernicus pointed out

that he was, you know,

some problems with it.

And then from Copernicus' work

we developed it into our own

modern heliocentric view of the world.

This is the ancient view where we have Earth

at the center,

and you have these concentric circles with spheres

of the different planets radiating from the Earth

up to the orbit of the fixed stars and then the

Primum Mobile, the first mover, the unmoved mover.

And then beyond that is in

different traditions, some unmanifest reality

that we can't really talk about.

We don't really have language to talk about this.

It's beyond anything we can say.

And the Hermetic sort of creation myth,

basically Nous, the Eternal Mind,

gets it into his head to create a world

and he creates a second Nous, the demiurge,

a kind of craftsman, a kind of lieutenant god,

and says, "Why don't you make me a world?"

And so the demiurge makes this world

and basically Earth at the center.

That's the space where, you know,

the world, our world on Earth is going to be made.

And the demiurge makes these sort of

seven circles around it.

And out of different influences, different attributes,

different characteristics from these

concentric circles, these spheres,

the Earth is made, and the Earth is the place of

the elements and bodies and time and space

and so on and so on.

And what happens is Nous, the Eternal Mind,

basically wants to show off.

He wants somebody to see his handiwork,

and so he creates Man with a capital M,

that means man and woman as well.

And he says, "Look what I've done."

And Man is very excited about this.

He pierces through the spheres

and sees the Earth, sees this beautiful planet,

sees nature and all that sort of thing.

Falls in love with his reflection on water.

Nature herself sees Man looking at her.

It's difficult to avoid these sort of

gender ways of talking about these things

but bear with me.

And basically the two of them fall in love with each other,

Man descends into Nature,

and Nature embraces Man and we'd be

pretty much been in that situation since then.

But on his descent down to nature

Man acquires characteristics of these different spheres.

Takes on attributes from them.

If you think of something starting out

as very etherial, very refined,

mist-like and gradually condensing,

gradually getting more and more solid

and taking on different attributes

and then finally gets down to the bottom here.

Now the idea, the journey through the planets

is that Nous tells Hermes that

through this creation process,

Man has become a creature of two worlds.

Man has a natural state,

a state that's acquired by picking up

all these characteristics from

the different planetary spheres, as a body,

existing time and space,

is subject to all the laws and limitations and

conditions and constraints

that everything has that exists in time and space.

And the way that this is described and spoken of is that

the planets basically control our fate.

the planets control fate and destiny.

We on Earth are subject to the influences

of these different planetary forces

and they basically call the shots.

And if you awaken though to the Hermetic call,

if you want ot regain access to

your spiritual side,

as I said we have two natures,

you have a physical, earthly, one in time and space,

but then we're also a part of the source

from which creation started.

We're a part of the eternal mind,

we're part of Nous.

And in fact when Nous first speaks to Hermes

he basically says, "I'm you talking to yourself.

"I'm the part of you that you don't recognize

"and I'm talking to you, I'm explaining to you

"what your true nature is and your true place

"in reality is."

The central idea in the Hermetic philosophy

was to journey back up

through the spheres,

journey back up through the planetary circles.

And on each level you give back what you acquired

or you transform it.

They talk about it in different ways

but it's more or less the same idea.

What was kind of an impediment,

what was the restraint on you,

what was something that weighed you down

you transform it into something useful,

you transform it into a power

that you can make use of,

and it empowers you.

Yourself becomes bigger through these things.

And so the Hermeticists would go up

through these spheres,

and that was the aim was to go up through these spheres.

And different Hermetic philosophers

would say that those who don't do this journey,

they're trapped in fate and they become wanderers

on the Earth which is an interesting way

to talk about them because the planets themselves

in Greek it means wanderer.

So, if you don't free yourself

from the influences of the planets,

you remain sort of one them on Earth itself.

And the ultimate aim of the journey

through the planets was to get beyond the stars.

There's a realm past the last sphere

where you get into the realm of causes,

the realm of the noumena rather than the phenomena.

This is back to the source, back to the spiritual energies

that created the cosmos in the first place

and of which we're part of,

we have a strong connection to it.

That's there but it's sunk.

It's hidden, it's obscured

by all the material that we've acquired in our descent

from the source down to the planets

through the planets down to Earth.

Now a group who I mentioned briefly earlier.

We have a very similar sort of theme,

very similar idea,

and were contemporaries with the Hermeticists

that Jung knew quite a bit about

and wrote quite a bit about were the Gnostics.

This is an image of the Gnostic god Abraxas.

Here's a variety of different interpretations

of what Abraxas means.

Those of you who are old enough to remember

the Hermann Hesse craze in the late '60s, early '70s,

you know his novel Demian.

Abraxas is a central sort of figure in that book.

This is a Gnostic novel that Hesse wrote

after he went through a series of psychoanalytic sessions

first with Jung and then later with a disciple of Jung,

a fellow named Joseph Lang.

And another reference from the past is that the

rock group Santana had an album called Abraxas

I think in the early '70s as well.

So as I said the Gnostics were someone,

a group that Jung had been reading about quite some time.

He says he first started reading about them in 1912

and even told Freud, they were still friends at the time,

that he thought that psychoanalysis

could learn something from the Gnostic Sophia.

Sophia means wisdom but it also

is a Gnostic diety, a Gnostic goddess,

who, like all of us, has fallen down to Earth

from the higher spheres and has become lost on the Earth.

And one of the themes or the metaphors

for the Gnostic journey is to rediscover,

is to find lost Sophia, find the lost wisdom

and bring her back up to her more divine state.

Jung went back to reading the Gnostics

in between 1918 and 1926.

And what had happened in between

his first reading of them in 1912

and when he went back was that depending

how you look at it he had either a psychotic episode,

an extended one, or he went through

a long process of spiritual transformation

following his break with Freud.

If you're familiar with the Red Book,

you're familiar with the story between Freud and Jung.

Jung was a close,

Freud wanted Jung to take on the mantle

of being the head of the psychoanalytic movement.

Jung in one sense is very happy to do that.

He had a great love for Freud.

He looked up to him as sort of a father

but he also had his genius of his own

and he wanted to go on his own path,

and the two had many different opinions

about a variety of different things,

and eventually Jung felt that he had to break away,

and he went through a traumatic experience after that.

Of you've read Memories, Dreams, and Reflections,

Jung talks at length about

what he went through.

He calls it his descent into the unconscious.

And it was during this crisis period

Jung is having a series of waking dreams,

visionary experiences,

strange paranormal episodes.

This is when he developed this process

that I mentioned earlier called active imagination

where he developed this way of actually

having a conversation, a talk with the unconscious contents,

with the archetypes as it were.

We know that Jung felt a close affinity with the Gnostics.

He told, I think it's Jolande Jacobi,

one his followers that the Gnostics were friends,

that is he felt in their company.

And this was kind of made official

in the early '50s when one of the Gnostic texts

that were found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945,

some of Jung's followers got together

and bought one of these codexes

and it's named the Jung Codex.

So Jung's association of the Gnostics is rather official.

One of the people that Jung learned

about the Gnostics from was a fellow named GRS Mead.

Mead was a brilliant scholar, a translator,

an interpreter of ancient Hermetic philosophy

who gets very little attention these days.

Most academic scholars don't pay much attention to him

because unlike them Mead believed in it.

He had a passionate,

emotional, existential investment

in these works.

He wasn't a detached academic scholar

just doing it and it could've been anything else.

It was something that he really believed in.

Jung even traveled to London once

to thank Mead for his translation of the Pistis Sophia.

That's a central Gnostic text that was discovered

fairly early, earlier than Nag Hammadi.

It was discovered in the late 1700s

which talks about Jesus' ministry after the resurrection.

It's a long text about what Jesus taught

after he was resurrected.

There's vast differences between the Gnostic

versions of Christianity and what became

the central one later on.

And if you're familiar Elaine Pegels' book,

The Gnostic Gospels,

and if you're not familiar with it

it's definitely worth reading 'cause she spells out

and very clearly, very readably

what were some of the central differences between

early Christianity and Gnosticism.

They all grew up in the same

kind of multi-cultural, multi-faith mulch

that was happening in Alexandria at the time.

Mead was also a secretary to HP Blavatsky in her last days.

And after falling out with theosophical society

he started the Quest Society.

And probably his most important book

was his book on ostracism called

the Fragments of a Faith Forgotten.

And just tangentially PD Ouspensky

the philosopher and followed Gurdjieff,

his original title for the book that we know

is In Search of the Miraculous.

It was called Fragments of a Forgotten Teaching,

but he realized that Mead had got their first

with his title of the book and so he didn't use it.

But there's enough of a connection between Jung

and the Gnostics for some Jung interpretators

to even say that Jung essentially was a Gnostic.

And there's very good reason to say this

because Jung himself produced the Gnostic text.

His estranged, poetic work that he wrote

during this breakdown that he went through

following the break up with Freud.

It's called Seven Sermons to the Dead.

And again this notion seven comes in.

We all know seven is a big number

in the Hermetic esoteric world.

But when you start looking,

actually you're surprised how many times

it does turn up.

And Jung tells a story in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

that while he was going through this crisis

or this paranormal, psychic, visionary

experiences were happening to him,

he's in his house in Kuüsnacht which is just outside Zurich,

on Lake Zurich.

His family's there.

They have been experiencing these things as well,

and they suddenly hear this ringing or loud banging

at the front door.

And they go to see and in traditional ghost stories,

startled there's no one there.

But then Jung starts hearing this voice

telling him that the dead have come from Alexandria,

well they've come from Jerusalem actually,

the dead have come from Jerusalem

and they need to speak to him.

They want him, they have to tell,

he has to tell them, he has to give them the answers

to the questions they're asking,

to the things they're seeking.

And so in this visionary state

he writes this strange poetic work,

called The Seven Sermons to the Dead,

which is very much like the kind of visionary material

that you do find in the Corpus Hermeticum.

And basically it's prophetic revelations

passed on to the dead by Basilides of Alexandria

Basilides was a Gnostic, a famous Gnostic teacher

from this period in Alexandria

that had been talking about.

The central theme in the Seven Sermons to the Dead

is Jung's idea of individuation.

It's the need to differentiate one's self

from what he calls the Pleroma.

The Pleroma is this Gnostic idea

of this kind of one that's beyond everything.

It's the unmanifest, the undifferentiated one.

And just in the process of going down from the source

down to Earth is a process of differentiation.

Likewise in Jung's psychology, the process of

coming from the unconscious matrix

into your own individual self is a process

of differentiation.

What is this gnosis that Jung is talking about?

It's a Greek word for knowledge,

but it's particular kind of knowledge.

Another Greek word for knowledge,

episteme is a knowledge we're most familiar with.

It's book-learning knowledge.

It's knowledge that you acquire step by step.

It's knowledge that you get when you go

to the British Library.

It's knowledge that comes in a logical kind of sequence.

And it comes from observation or experimental reasoning.

But gnosis is a kind of sudden knowledge,

and it's not only the knowledge,

it's the experience of having the knowledge.

So it's not only that you know something,

you have the experience of knowing it.

And Jung himself famously

in a late interview with him in 1959

when he's asked by John Freeman

who's doing an interview for the BBC about

whether he believed in God,

Jung said, "I don't believe, I know."

So Jung had this kind of experience,

and this experience that he had during this crisis

when he had these visionary states.

There's a difference between the Gnostic

approach to gnosis and the Hermeticists.

In a central sense, the Gnostics

were more paranoid.

The Gnostics believed that the world we live in

is a world created by a kind of idiot god,

this kind of false god who's created this world

and we are trapped in it.

And there's a true god beyond the world.

And we still have a spark from that true god.

And like the Hermeticists we have to get back to it.

But whereas the Gnostics want to escape

from the world in some sense,

the Hermeticists don't necessarily

want to escape from the world

but they want to learn knowledge within it

so that they can be who they truly are within the world.

They can fulfill their real responsibilities

and take their true place within the world,

not to escape it to another realm,

but not to be trapped and conditioned by

the powers of fate.

And what happens in the gnosis experience

for the Hermeticists was that

when they finally journey past the planets

they get up into these areas,

what they called the 8th and 9th spheres.

And these are spheres that are outside time,

they're outside space, they're beyond the cosmos.

They're beyond the universe.

We don't quite know exactly what they did.

We don't have a lot of information

about the Hermeticists.

We have more information about the Gnostics

than we do about the Hermeticists.

One thing we don't know, we don't know any of their names.

We don't know any of the people at the time

what their names were who were doing this

'cause they signed the text either Hermes Trismegistus

or some other kind of sage character.

They were anonymous.

There's some conjecture based on a lot of research

into contemporary practices at the time.

But we have good reason to believe that

there are Gnostic communities, excuse me,

Hermetic communities outside of Alexandria,

out into the desert.

They shared space with the Gnostics and the Essenes

around the same time.

But they did go through a variety of different practices

to induce these sort of visionary states.

They did kind of chanting with what is called

barbarous words of evocation.

They put together kind of Greek syllables

or different kind of words and smash them up

and would chant these kind of things

and induce a kind of non-rational state of consciousness

to get beyond the rational, logical mind.

They had guided inner journeys,

guided inner meditations

much like we have them today.

And when they were taken up through the spheres

and they finally got up into the 8th

and the 9th spheres, they were then

considered that they had joined

the Brotherhood of the Ogdoad,

it's the Brotherhood of the Eighth.

And the 8th sphere and even the 9th sphere was,

as I said, this kind of mystical experience

in which they had this experience of gnosis

when they had the true vision,

they had the true understanding

of their relations to the cosmos

and to god and to nous.

And they had two responses to that.

On some of the texts they talk about

them singing these songs of praise.

GRS Mead translated a group of

these songs of praise called the Hymns to Hermes.

And they're rather ecstatic, inspirational

kind of text.

And the other was silence.

It was a kind of mystical silence

where they can't say anything.

They're beyond words.

They reach the sphere where words

can no longer apply to their experience.

And what they called another term

of reaching this 8th and 9th sphere

is becoming Aion.

Aion in English means a long time,

but in the Greek and in the context

of Hermeticism and Gnostics,

it was a state outside of time.

And this is a picture of

a mithraic Aion.

I can't go into much,

I can't go into detail about Mithras now but

the mithraic religion was another mystery religion

around the same time as the Gnostics

and the Hermeticists and so on.

And we see the snake wrapped around him

much like the snake wrapped around Hermes' caduceus.

If you can make out the picture,

he's got the astrological signs on him,

and the wings and so on.

And he's lion-headed.

And in an interesting but controversial book

called the Jung Cult by a fellow named Richard Noll,

he argues that Jung himself tried to start

a kind of cult,

an esoteric cult with himself

as the sort of messiah figure.

And Jung records a series of visions

where he saw himself as a character like this.

And on one of the covers I think of the book,

there's a picture of this with Jung's head

on the top of it rather than the lion.

So, I mean, it's a good read, the Jung Cult,

it's very controversial.

A lot of people have argued against it and all that.

But this is a particular reference because

it's been said that Jung himself tried to

make himself this character in some way

and to have a following around him.

I'm just gonna quickly run through some parallels

to this same sort of journey through the planets

because it strikes me,

it's an archetype in the same way

that Jung talked about various other archetypes.

We can see the same sort of thing through

the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life

where you start off from Malkuth

which is our sphere here, the Earth,

and you work your way up through

the different sephiroth.

The moon, Yesod's the moon,

Hod is Mercury, Netzach is Venus,

Tiphereth is the sun.

We got Mars and Jupiter and so on,

up until I guess Binah is considered Saturn,

and then you have the fixed stars and the

Primum Mobile as well.

And then beyond that in the Kabbalistic system

you have what's called the Ain Soph Aur

which is this limitless light

which is much like the pleroma,

much like the sphere beyond the stars

that I've just talked about.

It also turns up in a more modern version

in Gurdjieff's Ray of Creation in the fourth way.

This is more or less taken from Ouspensky's book,

In Search of Miraculous.

In Gurdjieff's system, you have the absolute

again which is like the one, the Hermetic one,

or the pleroma.

And from it descends in this emanationist form

through less absolute conditions.

So you have the absolute or worlds which I suspect

means all galaxies, all suns,

all the stars within our galaxy,

the sun, the planets, Earth.

We're not quite at the lowest point.

The moon is lower than ourselves.

But in the Gurdjiefs work what one wants to do

is to subjecting yourself to Gurdjieff's very rigorous

and difficult practices and exercises.

You free yourself of different laws

that are associated with the different planets

In the Ray of Creation much like in the Hermetic idea

where you free yourself of the influences

of the different planets.

We can only get as far as the all suns Gurdjieff said.

We can't really go any further than that.

Again, that's much like getting up to the

end of the planetary spheres.

Another system, it's Rudolf Steiner's

notion of the evolution of consciousness.

Steiner says we start off in something

he called Old Saturn.

I don't know why he calls them these names.

They're rather kind of clumsy.

Old Saturn, Old Sun, then the moon,

and then on Earth, and then they're moving

to go back up to the source again.

So we start off in the spiritual realm,

the less solid or less condensed

the more etheric kind of state,

and over time we condense.

I mean, with Steiner the evolution of the cosmos

and the evolution of consciousness go hand in hand.

They're both together.

And the Earth is sort of rock bottom

and you can't go any lower than that

and you move your way back up.

So there's another version of the journey

through the planets with Steiner.

After our Earth incarnation which we're now,

the next one is Jupiter and then Venus and so on.

And even in something as old we can say,

and as ubiquitous these days

as the sort of shamanic tradition,

you have a similar idea, the sort of ladder to heaven.

And many accounts of what shamans do

is that they put themselves through a series

of practices into this kind of visionary state

and they somehow climb a ladder

or they acquire wings and they

fly back up back to the spirit world,

back to the source.

Some people even said this motif is embodied

in our own DNA.

Jeremy Narby who wrote a book called

the Cosmis Serpent, he's an anthropologist who was

influenced by reading Michael Harner,

another anthropologist account of taking the

drug ayahuasca.

And Harner says that he encountered these snakes

in his visions that gave him ancient wisdom,

and the snakes he said resided in an ancient

part of the brain.

Narby took the ayahuasca.

He had a similar experience where he met

these two boa constrictors.

They didn't eat him but they imparted

ancient wisdom to him.

One of the things they told him is,

well, one of the things he learned through this experience

was that the plants talked to him.

The plants told him this ancient wisdom they had

through his experience with the ayahuasca.

So through this visionary experience

he spoke to

a similar kind of spiral ladder

within the plants itself,

and it's embodied in our own DNA as well.

And just to get back to the Hermetic belief,

we have a similar theme here, again,

with Hermes' caduceus where you have

the entwined snakes,

could be the entwined spiral shape of the DNA.

And we have the caduceus,

the staff going through.

Now, some people have suggested

that the two snakes are the two sides

of the sides brain, left and right side,

the two halves of it.

It's the conscious/unconscious mind.

It could be either of those,

it could be both of them,

it could be many other things as well.

But they come together and their union,

the joining produces this orb, solid,

a whole, it's the one,

and the wings, it's lifting itself above

the physical state.

It's going up into the higher realms.

Now what has all this got to do with Jung?

That's a good question but I don't have time

to go into it right now.

Sorry. [laughter]

I mentioned a few tiems Jung's active imagination

and I've talked about Jung's crisis,

his descent into the unconscious.

But we can see this descent as ascent as well,

and we're already seen it in the Hermetic tradition

where the soul, the source goes down,

and then it works its way back up.

Heraclides said the way up and the way down

are the same.

So, what I want to sort of say,

what I've slowly started getting to is that

earlier I said that Jung has been accused of

psychologizing alchemy.

Many people were critical of Jung's

ideas about alchemy.

And not only rational scientists but practicing alchemists

or esotericists.

They said that he took something that was spiritual.

They complained from both sides.

They complained from the spiritual side

and also from the material side.

They say he took something that's a spiritual practice

and turned it into a psychological practice,

or a kind of psychological therapy,

and he also complained that he took something

that was actually happening in the outerworld.

They're practicing alchemist who say

there is a real transformation of matter going on here.

It isn't something that's just going on

in the psyche of the alchemists

and is mirrored outside in their practices.

There's a real sort of transformation going on

and they say that Jung psychologized

alchemy in this way.

Well, I wanna say we can Hermetacize Jung.

Jung said he's discovered this practice

of active imagination through his descent

into the unconscious and he based

all of his psychology on it.

Well, did he discover it or did he come upon something that

others have known for a long time already.

Did he come upon something that the Gnostics

and the Hermeticists and a variety of other

esotericists knew before?

I mean, this may not be news but it's a way

to look at it in a different way.

And as we're talking about eternal knowledge

I think we have reason to say

that Jung came upon something through this crisis

that was known at different times

to different people and different areas

and different cultures.

But it's something that's part of our own make up.

It's something that's part of our sort of structure.

But this is perhaps important today in a

more significant sense because back in the day

when the Ptolemaic view

of the concentric circles was dominant,

it was taken seriously.

The Earth was at the center.

There were these concentric spheres,

crystalline spheres that moved around the Earth,

and the other idea was that

the realm of the fixed stars and the realms beyond,

they were somehow different.

If you went out there,

matter would be different.

It wouldn't be the same as matter here

in the sub-lunar realms.

It would somehow be tangibly different.

Now we know that's not the case now.

We know that if you send a rocket out

beyond the solar system

matter isn't going to be very different.

Okay, it'll be different at a black hole,

that's an exception.

Pretty much if you keep going

out, out, out into the area that they call the fixed stars

and you could somehow reach out and

grab a piece of matter, it wouldn't be

any different than the matter here on Earth.

So this makes the point that, as I said earlier,

this journey is an inward journey.

It isn't a real journey out.

It's real but it's not a journey

out into the physical planets,

out into the physical stars,

it's a journey inward.

And this again was something that

the Hermeticists knew.

One of the central themes of Hermeticism is

man is a microcosm.

Man contains the whole universe.

Within ourselves we contain the whole macrocosm,

as above so below to which we can add

I'm not the first one to do this,

as within so without.

We try to say as behind so in front,

but that doesn't really work.

But what does this mean that

Man is a microcosm?

Now, you can take it in a very literal sense

that heart is like the sun,

or like the sexual organs are like the moon

or something like that.

There's a very literal way,

lots of books written about that.

But I'd rather look at it in broader sort of sense

that in some way our consciousness,

our inner worlds contain the entire world,

the whole universe is in here

and it's in there, and there, and there.

Maybe not you but in there, in there, in there,

and there as well.

We contain the whole thing.

So wee have everything we need to take this journey

through the planets.

I mentioned earlier that Hermes Trismegistus

was considered to be an Egyptian sage.

He learned his wisdom in Egypt

or what we know of his Egyptian wisdom

comes from Hermes Trismegistus.

And in very interesting series of books,

a fellow named Jeremy Naydler,

not to be confused with Jeremy Narby.

He's argued that in many ways this Egyptian wisdom

is very similar to what we know as shamanic

hunter traditions as well.

His central argument is that the Egyptian book of the dead

isn't only for fundamentally

a funeral text.

It isn't only something to be read after

someone's dead already

and to guide their soul,

much like the Tibetan book of the dead is.

He's saying that it's actually,

and we know the Egyptian book of the dead

is a huge collection of different writings

from different sources over different time

and it's always been added to.

The Tibetan book of the dead is much more selective,

and also we know that there isn't really,

in Tibet there isn't a Tibetan book of the dead.

This was a name Evans-Wentz gave to the

collection of texts that he had translated.

But there is an Egyptian book of the dead,

and it's a different funerary text that come from

different places and so on.

But Narby, excuse me, Naydler argues that

these texts were used

in initiatory practices.

And one of the things that one learns

through these texts is how to separate the soul

from the body.

This is the Bah rising

up above the,

mainstream Egyptologists would say

that's someone dead.

That's the sarcophagus and the Bah is lifting

up out of it to go do its thing.

And Naydler saying, actually no.

This is part of an initiatory practice here.

We are the initiators learning how to separate

his inner soul from the body.

And if you might remember from the beginning of the talk,

I say when Hermes Trismegistus has this vision,

his body is quiet, his senses are quiet,

he's in a deep, relaxed state,

almost in a trance kind of state.

Naydler is saying that this kind of thing

that's going on here,

this was the Egyptian wisdom that people

like Pythagoras and Plato

and other sages of the olden days learned.

And it's also in the hermetic work.

It's also a part of their Corpus Hermeticum.

Originally as I said it was thought that

Hermes anti-dated Plato and Pythagoras.

They learned from him.

The text written later,

and this led some scholars to say

there's no Egyptian connection whatsoever.

It's all Greek philosophy and some early Christianity

in there as well.

But if what Naydler is saying is true

that this sort of initiatory practice on learning

how to release the soul from the body

is part of the Egyptian wisdom

and if people like Pythagoras and Plato did go there

then there is a Egyptian connection

to the Hermetic philosophy.

It's not just Greek philsophy mixed up

with some other stuff going on at the time.

It has its roots in Egyptian ideas.

And what I wanna say is that Jung

sort of came upon this during his crisis.

He had a very active imagination.

Carl Jung did, if you know the Red Book,

I don't have to convince you of that.

This is one of the central images from it.

This is an inner guide that Jung encountered

during his crisis, Philemon,

that Jung said Philemon existed in his head.

He had nothing to do with him.

And Philemon himself was surprised to think

that Jung believe that everything going on his head

had something to do with him.

He said, well, there are things in here

that have nothing to do with you.

You just happen to open this door and come in here now.

This stuff's going on all the time whether you know

about it or not.

You've just found your way in here now.

It's got nothing to do with you.

The psyche has an objective content.

Aldous Huxley came to the same

conclusion after his experiences with mescaline

and other sort of visionary practices

when he said the mind has its,

and he's writing in the mid 20th century,

the mind has its own unexplored Amazonian basins.

It has its own dark continents.

It has its own Borneo and things like that.

And when we travel into it we're encountering

objective realities and entities that exist there

and they have nothing to do with us.

Now you can imagine why Jung, a psychiatrist

and psychologist didn't want

too many people to know that he was talking

to people inside his head.

That's the kind of thing people came to him about

and talked to him about.

So we can understand that he didn't want

news of that to get around very much.

And so we can understand why kept the Red Book secret

for many, many years.

But we look at this, this has sort of

a kind of Egyptian motif to it as well,

certainly an Alexandrian one.

And as I said earlier, when Jung was

received the revelation of the Seven Sermons to the Dead,

he was speaking through the voice of Basilides,

the ancient Gnostic from Alexandria.

I'm saying, Jung basically rediscovered

or tripped upon or stumbled upon

something that the Hermeticists were doing

centuries earlier.

And his encounter with the archetypes

that took place during this crisis

in which he built up his own psychology around,

we can see this in the same way as the Hermetic

encounter with the planets, of the different forces,

impinging on the pseudo planets which we have to

either free ourselves from or transform

into something useful and creative.

Jung's encounter with the archetypes

is practically the same thing.

Like the planets the archetypes push us around

until we become aware of them

and we can integrate them into our conscious mind.

Until we do that we're compelled to do things

we're pushed, influenced, in a variety of different ways.

We're acting out the influences of the archetypes,

just like the Hermeticists,

just like those of us who don't take the Hermetic journey

or acting out the influences of the planets on us.

We're controlled by them.

We're caught in the wheels of necessity

as one of the Hermeticists spoke of.

Now, very, very briefly, last two things.

I mentioned the twin serpents around the caduceus

that some people have seen this as the

two sides of the brain or the unconscious

and the unconscious twirled together

and producing this winged orb.

I mentioned earlier Jung's idea

of the transcendent function.

That's what the essence of his active imagination was,

his dialogue between conscious and the unconscious mind

producing something new, some new symbol

that resolved some horrible situation you're in.

That gives you insight in some problems you can't solve.

What Jung was doing when he was in these states

and also what people like Rudolf Steiner and Swedenborg

who I mentioned earlier with Ouspensky too,

in other context,

they're doing something each of us

experience at least twice a day when we

go to sleep at night or whenever we go to sleep

and we wake up in the day or whenever we wake up.

We go through this intermediate state,

the twilight state.

It's both sleeping and waking at the same time.

You can talk about day dreaming

as a kind of night waking.

You can say, turn it around in a way.

It's called hypnagogia which is a

slightly impronounceable name.

But it basically means,

hypnagogia means sort of sleep guide.

Gogue is a Greek word meaning

it's someone who takes you down,

leads you somewhere.

Hypnosis sleep.

So this state leads you into sleep.

And there's some researchers who split hairs,

and as we're coming out of sleep

they call it hypnopompic.

The pomp, the sort of the ceremonial procession out.

But they're pretty much the same, I think.

My own experience, we can all,

I'm sure some of you have been induced into this

during my talk so you must

have some first-hand experience of what

I'm trying to go on about here.

My own experience, it's much better to try to do this

early in the morning than late at night.

If you try to stay awake as you're falling asleep

you can catch some of these images,

but more times than not these minor experience

you induce the state of insomnia.

But if you can just lie in bed a little bit later

in the morning when you're waking up,

you can be aware of this intermediary state.

And it's different from dreaming

because in dreaming you're totally immersed in the dream.

You're in the dream, you forget who you are

or what you're doing or

chairs don't fly, all this kind of stuff.

You're completely immersed in it,

you accept everything.

In this intermediate that you can consciously

see the images,

you can constantly see the dream

or the proto-dream images coming.

And you also still aware of your

external surroundings.

So you're aware of the outer world

but you're also aware of this inner processes going on.

And the best book about hypnagogia,

it was published in 1987 by a fellow named

Andreas Mavromatis.

I write about his work in a bit

and a lot of the things when talking about in my other book,

or the book having to do with this talk,

Quest For Hermes Trismegistus.

This is about, basically it's kind of a search

for this character Hermes throughout history.

I also write about it in a book called

the secret history of consciousness

where I use this idea of hypnagogia as a theme

relating different sort of philosopher's consciousness

like Steiner and others.

When Steiner went into his states

and he read the Akashic record,

I'm not reducing what he was doing to hypnagogia

but we able to go into these kind of states.

When Swedenborg was taken on

journeys to heaven and hell by angels

he was able to induce himself into these sorts of states.

And where these encounters take place

even though these parts of the brain,

and hypnagogia is involved with the older

parts of the brain.

I mentioned earlier that Jeremy Narby

and Michael Harner when they took the ayahuasca

and they had these encounters with the snakes,

the snakes lived.

They resided in some old part of the brain they said.

Now there is a reptilian part of the brain.

This connection between this ancient wisdom, right,

and an ancient part of the brain.

It's an ancient wisdom,

it is ancient in one sense, really, physical sense because

it's being generated or it's being induced

or access to it is through this older part of the brain.

And what we're getting access to is

something that Jung's colleague and

other journeyer into the inner worlds,

Henri Corbin called the Mundus Imaginalis

which is the imaginal world.

Not the imaginary world,

not the fantasy world of what I'm gonna do

later on today or if only had a million dollars

I could go on a journey or something.

It's this world of these images

that's halfway between the pure

spiritual world, of pure being,

and the physical world.

Now, where Steiner went,

where Swedenborg went on his journeys

to heaven and hell where Jung went

when he descended into the unconscious

where the Hermeticists went on their journeys

to the planets, they all

went into this imaginal realm which is a real

objective realm.

It really exists.

It exists metaphorically in here.

So, in conclusion let me say that if we want to

take a journey through the planets,

we can do that ourselves because

we have a head full of stars.

And they're waiting for us to say hello to them.

Thank you very much.

[applause]