This essay examines the theological dead-end created by the privatio boni model, in which evil is reduced to absence and God remains wholly good by definition. Jung’s system is presented as a radical alternative: a metaphysics in which opposites coinhabit the divine, the Shadow belongs to God as much as to man, and consciousness arises only through the crucifixion-tension of those poles. By reintegrating evil into the God-image through Abraxas, Jung resolves the logical contradictions and psychic distortions produced by the unstable, all-good God thesis.

Welcome back. In this post I would like to discuss Jung’s gnostic cosmology. Before getting into its structure, it’s worth saying what this piece is. Most of the recent posts have been phenomenological – written from inside the field of living, tracing the felt psychic pressure points, the contradictions, the ruptures. This one is different: it’s an attempt to articulate the architecture those experiences revealed, like a map assembled after the fact once the terrain had already rearranged me. What follows is that map, in its current form, which is always subject to future clarifications and revisions.

First, a note on “gnosticism”. Gnosticism is an umbrella term meaning a whole variety of things to different people which are often conflicting, overbroad, and used as a smear term against things the wielder doesn’t like, so one should be careful about how one uses it. Here, “gnosticism” means insight or knowledge gained which leads one to understand that this world isn’t what it seems, that this world is steeped in philosophical pessimism – one is either striving after objects or bored, nothing lasts forever, the structure of reality is based on predator/prey dynamics (one must consume other living creatures in order to live) so it’s impossible to meet the standards of the Golden Rule, and living is pain – and that understanding and acceptance of this is, in a sense, salvific.

Now, under the traditional gnostic conception this reality was created by a malevolent or bumbling Demiurge, who was born of Sophia / wisdom, and who has lower level Archons who do his bidding (discussed here and here). There’s a whole detailed emanation structure which I don’t find to be particularly insightful. The Demiurge wishes to torture the God souls within each of us as he strives to become God himself (he can’t), and he and his archons desire to keep humanity locked in a prison of ignorance as they continue their torture. The idea for traditional gnostics was to realize and understand this setup and then to materially withdraw from the world, to focus on one’s individual connection to the Godhood and not to feed the Demiurge or archons one’s attention.

This perspective, though, is not Carl Jung’s perspective, which surprised me when I read his Answer to Job after gnostic scholar Stephan Hoeller called him the greatest modern gnostic. I did a post on it which you can read here where I struggled to resolve the discrepancies between the traditional gnostic perspective vs. Jung’s, which was so alien that I am still grappling with it today. Yet I am coming to understand his approach not just intellectually but also phenomenologically, and it is such a radical departure from normal understandings that it deserves to be grappled with in a deep and sustained way.

To start with, let’s discuss humanity’s understanding of the God image. Under Jung’s conception, we cannot perceive God itself; rather, we have an image in our head of what God is, and this image evolves over time (and is, in his opinion and my own, impacted by astrological ages – i.e. under Taurus the God image was the earth deities, under Aries the God image involved warrior solar Gods, under Pisces it was Christ, and under Aquarius, which we are entering now, it is the water bearer). During the Christian aeon the Western conception of God involved the privatio boni, where all good was assigned to God and all evil was deemed to be a deprivation of God – the “good” was emanating from the Godhood into the darkness of nothingness and evil, basically. (The privatio boni is related to Plato’s idea of forms, where the forms of perfect good exist in the nether and the materialization of forms into particulars is always deficient – what is the perfect form of feces or a cannibal, though? There’s no reason why a perfect form has to be in relation to good, which Plato ignores). So under this conception people wanted to be associated with “good” in order to connect to God through the Church as intermediary, hoping to go to Heaven after death, and they suppressed their darkness or evil into the unconscious – because to acknowledge it would have meant grappling with one’s own evil, which would then impact one’s conception of God as all good and of the traditional understanding of Heaven and Hell.

The problem is that when the unacknowledged shadow of our personalities is suppressed, it bleeds out unconsciously into our lives in ways we cannot control or predict, often with devastating consequences. This applies both on an individual level and on a collective level (the Other as evil and must be destroyed, but the Other is often our projections of our own shadow side). This isn’t to argue that the God image in prior aeons was perfect; rather, the evolution of the God image is a result of the prior aeon’s God image deficiencies (and there are always deficiencies, because we are limited and finite beings) – in the Age of Aries, for example, those who were conquered or victims of the various manifestations of the sun God, whether Zeus or Yahweh, had a very rough go of things – it was very hard to live as conquered with no rights or inherent value or dignity, which then led to ressentiment and why Christianity caught on so readily, because it gave value to those suffering low class masses who otherwise had none.

Going back to the privatio boni, there is no way of dissolving our inherent evil, but this isn’t because of Original Sin – instead, it is because in this reality everything is defined by its opposite. There can be no good without evil, light without darkness, happiness without sadness, life without death. Good and evil, matter and spirit, love and hatred, greed and asceticism, short term versus long term, light and darkness, persona vs shadow, masculine vs feminine, rational/scientific vs irrational/spiritual, action vs. reflection, justice vs. mercy, order vs. chaos, hope vs. lucidity, these terms only make sense in terms of their opposites.1 Each of these energies is defined as a spectrum with its opposite (thesis/antithesis), and pushed to an extreme an energy will often flip into its opposite, a concept called enatiodromia. The idea is that these opposite energies are what powers reality itself, it serves as the driving force behind the will which seeks to resolve the pain of contradiction2, and because God is an infinite being – outside of space and time and yet permeating every aspect of it, not pantheism but panentheism – it means that God himself is the ultimate unity of opposites. The myth of the Fall, then, is the myth of a descent from the unity of opposites to a realm of split opposites. This perspective can be looked at from an apophatic (via negativa) angle: knowing or describing God by negation – saying what God is not, and he is not any one side of the opposites, or it can be looked at from a cataphatic (via positiva) angle: knowing or describing God by affirmation – saying what God is using positive statements, as the ultimate unity of opposites.

This is a conception of God that Jung called Abraxas in his Liber Novus, and it is a horrifying concept: God as not just all good but all good and all evil, everything – not a trinity but a quaternity: the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and Satan. What does Abraxas lack under this conception? Under this conception Abraxas lacks consciousness, because consciousness only arises from split opposites – he lacks a limited standpoint from which the opposites are not reconciled but felt as torment and therefore known. Abraxas is part of the pleroma, which is a space where the opposites are not yet differentiated, although Abraxas is also separate from the pleroma because of his action and effectiveness. This is what humanity is for, humanity’s role – and all living creatures, as there is a God spark within everything – it is God observing himself from a limited vantage point, with consciousness, which then adds to God’s infinity by increasing its own consciousness which it would otherwise lack. Under this conception everything that mankind or living creatures do adds to its infinity, no matter how good or how bad – which is horrifying, but it renders the problem of evil livable without moral falsification (grimly) which so insistently rears its head under the privatio boni.

This framework does not license indifference, cruelty, or despair. It removes guarantees, not responsibility. If anything, it intensifies responsibility by stripping away metaphysical consolation. Under Abraxas, no act is erased, no suffering is retroactively redeemed, and no injustice is cosmically compensated. What remains is consciousness itself – fragile, costly, and contingent – and the task of sustaining it without appeal. The refusal to collapse into predation or withdrawal is not obedience to a moral law, but fidelity to the very consciousness that makes meaning possible.

Something critical is lost when this all-good God collapses: Abraxas does not merely resolve the problem of evil; he exacts a cost. That cost is hope. Under the privatio boni, suffering is implicitly provisional: it is either punishment, test, or deprivation awaiting correction. Under Abraxas, suffering loses that narrative alibi. It is no longer justified by goodness, nor redeemed by outcome. It simply is.

This is why Abraxas is more terrifying than atheism. Atheism denies meaning and leaves rebellion intact. Abraxas preserves meaning while stripping it of moral reassurance. Everything that happens – noble or monstrous – adds equally to the fullness of being. God is not moving history toward the good; he is metabolizing experience toward totality. From this perspective, there is no promise that individuation alleviates pain, only that it renders pain conscious.

This represents a catastrophic blow to the human economy of hope. The crucifixion of opposites is no longer a passage toward resolution but the condition of consciousness itself. One does not individuate in order to escape contradiction; one individuates in order to endure it without falsification. Any spirituality that promises otherwise is quietly reintroducing the all-good God through the back door.

Under Jung’s conception3, then, it is our task as humans to try to resolve the contradictions within ourselves – pulled endlessly between competing energies, it is as if we are all Christ on the cross, crucified between the opposites. As Jung wrote in his diaries as discussed by Hoeller, “You must be in the middle of life, surrounded by death on all sides. Stretched out, like one crucified, you hang in him, the fearful, the overpowering.” To Jung (and to me), one simply can’t pick a polarity with our ego; rather, the idea is to hold the opposites consciously, to feel the crucifying energy of it, and if we hold it for long enough what he called the transcendent function will occur – where an intuition deep within ourselves will point to the answer provisionally, which comes from outside or inside of ourselves, not from the ego, and the result of which is often surprising. To do this process over and over again throughout life is the individuation process, where we become more of ourselves, and it never ends, a circumambulation around the center of the Self. The idea is to acknowledge Abraxas – one can’t escape from him, he will find us as he likes – but also to individuate away from him toward our own north star, hinting at a figure even beyond Abraxas, beyond the unity of opposites themselves – something totally unknowable.4 The one thing we possess which Abraxas doesn’t, consciousness, allows us to reflect on and even judge creation in a way that he himself is not able to do.

When one understands this world as conflicting opposites, that our goal is to hold them without collapsing into one polarity and to allow the transcendent function to decide courses of action, that higher level spirituality involves the unity of opposites, problems take on a much more multi-dimensional tone; inputs become also-and instead of either-or, because an issue can be hit on any number of ways along the polarity of the opposite energies. When one begins to see how many different ways a problem can be looked at, one may enter a field of what Jung described as numinosity – as I wrote in a Note, “This is what Jung called a numinous field, where the boundaries between psyche and metaphysics collapse. This is experiencing the psyche as alive. Living systems are ambiguous by nature; dead systems are not. The inner world is the place where biology, psyche, myth, physics, metaphysics, memory, destiny, symbol, and meaning all collapse into one undifferentiated experiential field. The ego wants to label it. The Self does not care – it operates regardless of what label one gives it. The deeper truth is that the process of individuation reshapes one’s interiority by something mysterious whose nature exceeds these categories. The ambiguity is the mark of authenticity. If it were clean, literal, and easily defined, it would be ideology, not transformation.”

Under this conception, the “evil” which has been suppressed in the Age of Pisces and projected outwards unconsciously and uncontrollably may now be integrated with the hope of approaching wholeness, which is what God is – a whole and complete being, minus consciousness anyway. Instead of withdrawing from material reality into asceticism, the idea is to engage meaningfully with reality with the hope of approaching wholeness in our lives – a critical difference which sets Jungian thought apart from historical gnosticism. There are two possible uses of the insight that evil belongs within the God-image: the powerful use it to justify asymmetry (“eat or be eaten”), but the individual may use it to dissolve the illusion that anyone can claim moral authority over another – as we are all crucified between the opposites along our unique journeys with the Self as mediator. Once evil is acknowledged as coextensive with the divine polarity, the old binaries can’t do their work anymore. They still exist, but the psychic charge is gone. The crucifixion between opposites becomes an interior fact rather than a story told about someone else. And the moment that happens, the world’s standard narratives – moral, political, eschatological – lose their ability to conscript the psyche.

This is where I see the God image heading in Aquarius, even though we are still in a centuries-long transition period. If there is any consolation in this view, it is not redemptive. It lies only in the recognition that the apparent madness of the world is structurally intelligible, that the contradictions are not accidental, and that consciousness itself arises from their sustained tension. Beyond that, there remains only the possibility – not the promise – that the Self is not identical with the totality of this system, and that what occasionally orients us does not originate from within the economy of opposites at all. Ultimately I, like Edinger, think that Jung’s conception of the individuation process, of Abraxas, and of the critical importance of the unity of opposites may make him perceived historically as the first modern being of the new age.

Lastly, I am aware this post raises urgent questions that demand answers: If Abraxas is indifferent, why sustain differentiation at all? If good and evil are ontologically co-equal, why prefer one over the other? What prevents this from licensing predation? What happens to Heaven, Hell, and cosmic justice? What kind of psyche can metabolize this without collapse? Who is this for, and who should never approach it? I will address these and others directly in the next post, including the framework’s strengths, weaknesses, costs, and the narrow band of people for whom this God image becomes necessary rather than destructive.

Thanks for reading.

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1 Even the distinction between conscious and unconscious belongs to this structure, though consciousness itself arises only when that distinction is lived from a limited standpoint rather than unified in the whole.

2 Hans Eysenck, who at the time of his death was the most cited living psychologist in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and whose research regularly contradicted the establishment and who I covered previously, and Ernst Junger – discussed here – both commented how they were crucified by opposing energies. Here’s Eysenck:

As an exile I ceased to identify with German culture and became a true European, with firm roots in English and French culture as well as German….I also became well acquainted with American history and culture, so that I feel at home in all four cultures without feeling attached particularly to any of them.

There is, of course, as always, a negative as well as a positive side. He who has four mother countries has none; being fluent in three languages I had no true ‘mother tongue’. We all long to have a ’local habitation and a name’; having more than one means we do not have a special one to call our own. To the English I will never be English; to the Germans I will never be German. In France and the USA I will always be a foreigner. Do I feel German, or English, or what? Thee answer is that I feel what I am: an exile with no true home.

And here’s Junger:

When viewed politically, man is almost always a mixtum compositum [hodge-podge]. Time and place exert huge demands upon him.

In this sense, when seen from the ancestral and feudal perspective, I am a Guelph, whereas my concept of the state is Prussian. At the same time, I belong to the German nation and my education makes me a European, not to say a citizen of the world. In periods of conflict like [World War 2], the internal gears seem to grind against each other, and it is hard for an observer to tell how the hands are set. Were we to be granted the good fortune to be guided by higher powers, these gears would turn in harmony. Then our sacrifices would make sense. Thus we are obligated to strive for the greater good, not for our present benefit, but for reasons of our mortuary practices.

3 Jung’s conceptions of Abraxas arise from his understanding of the human psyche; he was ambivalent about whether these concepts might extend beyond them, arguing he could only comment on the state of the evidence presented to him. In public comments he always insisted he was an empirical scientist focused on categorizing phenomenon, yet his Liber Novus and Seven Sermons to the Dead betrays a belief that may have extended beyond that. Jung was very sensitive toward criticism that he was founding a new religious movement, which, in the early 20th century focused on science and dismissive of religion, would have rendered him summarily dismissed as a crank. He stayed solidly behind, never crossing that line, although he approached it in old age with Answer to Job and his autobiography – and even if he had made the leap beyond it, he believed he would be considered a prophet and worshipped by his followers, which was (correctly) exactly the opposite of his intention – the individuation process was and is about discovering ourselves, not blindly following anyone else. This is why he famously said, “My grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung, founded a home for mentally retarded children. Now I am founding another one (the Zurich Institute), for mentally retarded adults [i.e. Jungian therapists].”

I will cover this in a future post, but I believe that the Gods never disappeared – rather, they have been reborn within the human psyche as these competing and oppositional energies, and it is up to us as humans to navigate between them. I think the modern era may be much more receptive toward such a message than in Jung’s time.

4 Jung in Liber Novus: “You have in you the one God, the wonderfully beautiful and kind, the solitary, starlike, unmoving, he who is older and wiser than the father, he who has a safe hand, who leads you among all the darknesses and death scares of dreadful Abraxas. He gives joy and peace, since he is beyond death and beyond what is subject to change. He is no servant and no friend of Abraxas.” But this passage reintroduces a softened, internalized form of privatio boni – Jung is attempting to re-stabilize the psyche after Abraxas without collapsing back into moral dualism. He installs a counterweight as a psychologist because Abraxas alone is metabolically unbearable for most psyches. But this is weak; instead, my conception of the Self is as an integrator toward deeper self-understanding and interiority, connection to deeper aspects of oneself via intuition outside of one’s ego choice, and which is often surprising. One may choose to trust the Self, within reason, because the alternative is ego identification/ego inflation and an inability to choose between infinitely contradictory opposites. It is possible that the Self lies beyond the infinite contradictions as a result, but it is not clear, nor do I want this ambiguity resolved – it is better as an indeterminate guiding star, because labeling and classifying it would lead to dogma and ideology.