ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that C. G. Jung’s essay, “The Transcendent Function”, and his Gnostic-themed text, The Seven Sermons to the Dead, both written in the same year, 1916, during his confrontation with the unconscious, are, in fact, twin documents. Although the language of the two texts varies in accordance with their differing natures, it is precisely the same themes which exist in both the Seven Sermons and the essay on the transcendent function. Most notable is that, whereas the ultimate reality for the Gnostics is wholly transcendent–indeed, alien, in Philemon’s myth, the Pleroma is, paradoxically, both transcendent and immanent, but rather more immanent. A principal tenet that characterises Gnostic philosophy is that human beings have within them a spark of the transcendent divinity, that is, their innermost, fundamental essence, of which they have forgotten, is identical with that of the divine.
