Xognosis EsotericaArcane Publishing StudioIn January 1916, according to his own memoir, Carl Gustav Jung stood in a house that his family believed was haunted. A daughter saw a white figure cross a room. Another daughter reported her blanket snatched away twice in a single night.
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In January 1916, according to his own memoir, Carl Gustav Jung stood in a house that his family believed was haunted. A daughter saw a white figure cross a room. Another daughter reported her blanket snatched away twice in a single night. His nine-year-old son woke from an anxiety dream and drew a picture he called "The Picture of the Fisherman," complete with a devil cursing from across a river and an angel declaring the fisherman safe because "he only catches the bad fish!" Then, on a Sunday around five in the afternoon, the front doorbell rang frantically while the whole household stood within sight of an empty doorstep. Jung, sitting near the bell, watched it move with no hand on it. What happened over the following three evenings became one of the strangest documents in the history of psychology: the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, the Seven Sermons to the Dead.
The account comes from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the memoir Jung dictated to Aniela Jaffé in his late seventies, published after his death. It deserves an honest label: this is autobiography told decades later, not a diary entry. Still, the memoir is vivid. "The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits," Jung wrote. "They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe." And then the visitors spoke, in chorus: "We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought."
The line echoes the opening of the text the spirits supposedly demanded. In the Baynes English translation, the First Sermon begins: "The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching." In the memoir's telling, the moment the pen was taken up, the siege ended. "As soon as I took up the pen, the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over."
The Sermons themselves are short, dense, and strange. Their title page attributes them to "BASILIDES IN ALEXANDRIA, / THE CITY WHERE THE EAST TOUCHETH THE WEST." Basilides was a real Gnostic teacher of second-century Alexandria, but no ancient work by this name exists. The byline is a device, an old habit of pseudepigraphy in spiritual literature that Hoeller compares to the Zohar's attributions. The drafts tell an even more complicated story: in the Black Books, Jung's contemporaneous notebooks, it is Jung himself who speaks the sermons; in the Red Book transcript, his imagined guide Philemon speaks them; the printed pamphlet hands them to Basilides. Three voices for one text.
The teaching the dead receive runs from nothingness to a forgotten god. "Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty." This void-that-is-also-plenitude Jung names the PLEROMA, a term borrowed from ancient Gnosticism. Against it stands the creature's drive toward distinctiveness, the principium individuationis, the principle that would anchor the rest of Jung's psychology. Between the two stands Abraxas, "a god above god, since in its effect it uniteth fullness and emptiness," a god "whom ye knew not, for mankind forgot it." The text is blunt about him: "To worship it, is death. To fear it, is wisdom." When the dead hear this, "they were Christians," and they raised a great tumult. By the Seventh Sermon they have had enough: "the dead were silent and ascended like the smoke above the herdsman's fire, who through the night kept watch over his flock."
The historical record needs sorting. The memoir gives the year as 1916 and the composition as three evenings, which is Jung's own account of an intense burst, not an outside witness's. The Black Books, per the 2009 Red Book, record the Sermons being drafted between 31 January and 8 February 1916, and Lance Owens reconstructs the doorbell Sunday as 30 January 1916, which was indeed a Sunday. Stephan Hoeller's earlier book, published in 1982 before the Red Book was available, placed composition between December 1916 and February 1917. The conflict stands unresolved in the record; the Red Book-based dating now carries more weight.
One detail resists harmonizing. The memoir calls the doorbell day "a bright summer day," while the dated drafts point to the depths of a Swiss January. No scholar in the verified sources addresses this tension directly, and no explanation should be invented for it here. The observable fact is a discrepancy between a late retelling's seasonal detail and the notebook dating.
The pamphlet's printing history is its own small fog. Jung had the German text printed privately, without copyright and without a date; Hoeller's edition history concludes it was presumably issued in the early 1920s, certainly before 1925. Retellings that say "printed in 1916," Owens's introduction among them, borrow the composition date for the printing. The Baynes English translation appeared in 1925, privately printed by John M. Watkins in London. Asked about the Sermons late in life, Jung reportedly grumbled that they had been a "youthful indiscretion," a remark preserved by Hoeller and by Marie-Louise von Franz with a qualification: perhaps publishing them was the folly, the conceptions were not.
Jung's own verdict on the haunting stayed psychological rather than spectral. The experience, he wrote, "was an unconscious constellation whose peculiar atmosphere I recognized as the numen of an archetype." Some later readers took the Basilides byline and the reported phenomena as automatic writing or channelling; Jung framed it otherwise, and the memoir lets him have the last, wry word: "what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!"
Thirty-six years after the dead besieged Küsnacht, an actual Gnostic codex did. In December 1945, thirteen leather-bound codices containing more than fifty texts were found buried near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. On 10 May 1952, the C. G. Jung Institute of Zurich bought one of them, a fourth-century Coptic manuscript in the Subakhmimic dialect, from an antiquities dealer in Belgium. It contained five texts: the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, the Apocryphon of James, the Gospel of Truth, the Treatise on the Resurrection, and the Tripartite Tractate.
What followed was part ceremony, part controversy. On 15 November 1953 the Institute held a public celebration at which its director, C. A. Meier, "baptized" the manuscript the Jung Codex. Jung wanted no part of the christening. He had already written to Meier on 27 October that the idea made him uneasy, and in November he suggested the codex be deposited in the Zurich Central Library where scholars could reach it. The library declined; the codex sat in a Leu Bank vault while its editio princeps appeared in installments from 1956 to 1975. On 12 October 1975 the Zurich leaves went back to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, reunited over 1975-76 with the rest of Codex I.
A popular retelling claims the codex was bought for Jung's personal library. That is wrong, and the letters above are the correction: the Institute was the buyer, and Jung pushed for open access. James M. Robinson, the main source for this stretch of the story, adds sharper judgments, that the codex had been illegally exported from Egypt and that access to it was monopolized for two decades. Those assessments should stay attributed to him.
The haunted house is autobiography told late; the Sermons survive in dated notebooks; the codex that borrowed Jung's name against his wishes carried the Gnostic texts he had spent a lifetime circling. Hold those three facts together and the legend mostly tells itself.
The strange loop closes here. In 1916 Jung wrote a Gnostic text and signed it with a dead teacher's name. In 1952 his Institute bought a real Gnostic codex, and a year later it took his. Readers who want to meet those texts, the Gospel of Truth and the Tripartite Tractate among them, can find them explored in Gnosticism Explained, which follows the thread from Nag Hammadi all the way to Jung. The dead, Jung said late in life, had become for him "the voices of the unanswered. unresolved and unredeemed." He spent the rest of his career answering them.
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