The Search for Roots: C. G. Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis

Alfred Ribi

Jul 2013 · Gnosis Archive Books

About this ebook

 The publication in 2009 of C. G. Jung's The Red Book: Liber Novus has initiated a broad reassessment of Jung’s place in cultural history. Among many revelations, the visionary events recorded in the Red Book reveal the foundation of Jung’s complex association with the Western tradition of Gnosis.

In The Search for Roots, Alfred Ribi closely examines Jung’s life-long association with Gnostic tradition. Dr. Ribi knows C. G. Jung and his tradition from the ground up. He began his analytical training with Marie-Louise von Franz in 1963, and continued working closely with Dr. von Franz for the next 30 years. For over four decades he has been an analyst, lecturer and examiner of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, where he also served as the Director of Studies.

But even more importantly, early in his studies Dr. Ribi noted Jung’s underlying roots in Gnostic tradition, and he carefully followed those roots to their source. Alfred Ribi is unique in the Jungian analytical community for the careful scholarship and intellectual rigor he has brought to the study Gnosticism. In The Search for Roots, Ribi shows how a dialogue between Jungian and Gnostic studies can open new perspectives on the experiential nature of Gnosis, both ancient and modern. Creative engagement with Gnostic tradition broadens the imaginative scope of modern depth psychology and adds an essential context for understanding the voice of the soul emerging in our modern age.

A Foreword by Lance Owens supplements this volume with a discussion of Jung's encounter with Gnostic tradition while composing his Red Book (Liber Novus). Dr. Owens delivers a fascinating and historically well-documented account of how Gnostic mythology entered into Jung's personal mythology in the Red Book. Gnostic mythology thereafter became for Jung a prototypical image of his individuation. Owens offers this conclusion:

“In 1916 Jung had seemingly found the root of his myth and it was the myth of Gnosis. I see no evidence that this ever changed. Over the next forty years, he would proceed to construct an interpretive reading of the Gnostic tradition’s occult course across the Christian aeon: in Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism. In this vast hermeneutic enterprise, Jung was building a bridge across time, leading back to the foundation stone of classical Gnosticism. The bridge that led forward toward a new and coming aeon was footed on the stone rejected by the builders two thousand years ago.”

Alfred Ribi's examination of Jung’s relationship with Gnostic tradition comes at an important time. Initially authored prior to the publication of Jung's Red Book, current release of this English edition offers a bridge between the past and the forthcoming understanding of Jung’s Gnostic roots.

Ratings and reviews

This book is the first volume of Dr. Alfred Ribi’s 2-volume masterwork on Jung’s depth psychology and its deep roots in Gnosticism. It is the rare kind of book that brings much needed clarity to ancient mysteries in a way both challenging to the expert in Gnosticism and Jung’s depth psychology and, at the same time, accessible even to those with basic understanding of those fields. I urge everyone to read Dr. Lance Owens’ absolutely superlative Forward to this book. It covers a lot of ground to prepare the reader to delve deep into the mysteries of the ancient Gnostics and what they have to say about modern times. The one thing I will relay to you from it is that, as Jung was conducting his self-experiments in working with the unconscious during the period 1913 - 1916, he urgently sought corroboration of his experiences. He searched for other cultures in other times who had experienced the unconscious as he did. He did this because he needed to confirm that what he had to offer was not based only on his personal experiences but was potentially applicable to other human beings. As Dr. Owens writes in the Forward, it was in the writings of the Gnostics that Jung found such corroboration. Because of our almost exclusive focus on and value of conceptual knowledge, Ribi begins the book by reminding us that “gnosis,” as it was understood by the ancients, is not particularly well understood now. Thus, he provides the reader with a very helpful contrast in order to give them a sense of what was meant by “gnosis,” and uses this contrast to approach the very definition of “gnosis” itself. The contrast is one based on the distinction between outer knowing and inner knowing and states that it is this inner knowing, experiential in nature, that is meant by “gnosis.” Ribi then turns to a modern example of some of the ancient disputes the Gnostics had with the movement toward Church orthodoxy in the dispute between philosopher Martin Buber and Jung. The reason for focusing on this dispute is, as Ribi says, that when there is a dispute between two profoundly intelligent people, often this dispute “acquires a collective aspect, lending to it a significance that makes a more detailed investigation of their respective views worthwhile.” We then continue to move toward a better understanding of gnosis through another contrast, this one between philosophy/theology and the direct revelation of the Gnostics. In this contrast, I was pleased to see Ribi, in his normal balanced scholarly way, identify *both* the strengths and the weaknesses of each approach. I was also pleased to see how each of the strengths/weaknesses related to how the Gnostics and the Orthodox Christians approached what Ribi called the “spiritual disorientation of the Roman world.” Each adapted to that world in its own way, but each also had to address the dangers its own approach entailed. The lion’s share of the book is devoted to Ribi’s commentary on Jung’s “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos.” This work emerged out of Jung’s urge to give form to what one of the figures in his confrontation with the unconscious had to say. Once Jung allowed himself to be used as a vehicle for such expression, he said it flowed out of him and he was able to complete it in three days. The result was a text written in a Gnostic style and which made use of Gnostic ways of thinking. Ribi’s excellent commentary complements the one published by Dr. Stephen Hoeller in his book “The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead” in that Ribi brings his deep understanding of and experience with depth psychology and the use of Jung’s own published writings to elucidate and expand on each piece of the sermons, thereby giving much needed and familiar context to these enigmatic Gnostic thoughts.

About the author

Alfred Ribi was born in 1931. He studied medicine in Zurich, followed by specialization in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy FMH. In 1963, he began analysis with Marie-Louise von Franz—a close associate of C. G. Jung—and subsequently worked for many years with Dr. von Franz as a colleague. He is a diplomat of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich, where he has served as Director of Studies, and as a teaching and control analyst, lecturer and examiner of the Institute. He is a past President of the Founda- tion for Jungian Psychology, and of the Psychological Club Zurich. Since 1968, Dr. Ribi has been in private practice in Meilen, and now in Erlenbach.