White Bird, Black Serpent, Red Book: Exploring the Gnostic Roots of Jungian Psychology through Dreamwork

This book examines the influence of Gnostic philosophy on Jungian psychology as indicated by Jung’s essay, 'The Transcendent Function' (1916), and his Gnostic-inspired treatise, The Seven Sermons to the Dead (also written in 1916).

Relevant and timely due to the relatively recent publication of Jung’s The Red Book, the hypothesis of this work is that the Seven Sermons is the mythopoetic, metaphysical twin of 'The Transcendent Function' and that these texts can be considered as two sides of the same coin. The Seven Sermons formed a prelude to everything Jung was to communicate about the unconscious—in other words, an embryonic form of the principal tenets of analytical psychology can be found in a Gnostic-inspired text.

As Gnostic philosophy was the inspiration for both texts, this book also highlights correspondences between both of Jung’s works and the Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi Library, paying particular attention to the theme of the opposites—arguably the crucial theme at the very heart of Jung’s psychology. Accompanying an analysis of these texts is an experiential investigation of the influence the topic had on the occurrence of the transcendent function in the author’s dreams, the intention of which is to provide a richer description of the experience of the transcendent function and to facilitate a deeper understanding of the topic.