ABSTRACT
Gnosticism for the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung is a psychological enterprise expressed in physical or metaphysical form. The support that Gnosticism and alchemy give to Jung's psychology depends on their being read psychologically, and read as attempts at the Jungian goal of individuation. In Gnosticism the progression is from the Gnostic's sheer bodily existence to the release of the immaterial spark within the Gnostic's body and the reunion of that spark with the godhead. Gnosticism preaches identification with one's newly discovered divinity, which is thereby identical with the Gnostic god, or godhead. What in Jungian psychology is only a means to an end – return to the unconscious – is for Gnosticism equivalent to the end itself. Gnosticism can still be read in Jungian terms, but psychologically it espouses the opposite of the Jungian ideal. Jung parallels the Gnostic process of liberating the immaterial sparks from matter to the alchemical process of extracting gold from base metals.
