ABSTRACT
In sharp contrast to the Judaeo-Christian tradition which teaches that God created this world, the Gnostics maintained that this world was created, not by a transcendent, ultimate divinity, but by Sophia's bastard child, the demiurge, and his minions, the archons. The Gnostic demiurge and the archons are not explicitly referenced in the Seven Sermons. Due to their limited powers, the archons need to control humanity through deception. Despite the fact that there is no mention of the archons in the Seven Sermons, a parallel can be drawn between them and Carl G. Jung's psychological concept of the archetype. In Jungian psychology, an archetype is a primordial, universal mental image thought to have been inherited from humanity's earliest ancestors and considered to exist in the collective unconscious, and therefore accessible, albeit indirectly, by an individual psyche. The archetype provides the psychological pattern, and the individual's subjective experience fills it in.
