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VII
SERMONES AD MORTUOS - C G JUNG
Sermo III
Like mists arising from a marsh, the dead came near and cried : Speak
further unto us concerning the supreme god.
Hard to know is the deity of Abraxas. Its power is the greatest, because
man does not perceive it. From the sun he draws the summum bonum; from
the devil the infinum malum; but from Abraxas LIFE, altogether indefinite,
the mother of good and evil.
Smaller and weaker life seems to be than the summum bonum; wherefore
it is also hard to conceive that Abraxas transcends even the sun in power,
who is himself the radiant source of all the force of life.
Abraxas is the sun, and at the same time the eternally sucking gorge of the void, the belittling and dismembering devil.
The power of Abraxas is twofold; but you see it not, because for your eyes the warring opposites of this power are extinguished.
What the god-sun speaketh is life.
What the devil speaketh is death.
But Abraxas speaks that hallowed and accursed work which is life and death at the same time.
Abraxas begets truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.
It is splendid as the lion in the instant he striketh down his victim.
It is beautiful as a day of spring
It is the great Pan himself and also the small one.
It is Priapos.
It is the monster of the under-world, a thousand-armed polyp, coiled
knot of winged serpents, frenzy.
It is the hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning.
It is the lord of the toads and frogs, which live in the water and go
up on the land, whose chorus ascends at noon and at midnight.
It is abundance that seeks union with emptiness.
It is holy begetting.
It is love and love's murder.
It is the saint and his betrayer.
It is the brightest light of day and darkest night of madness.
To look upon it, is blindness.
To know it, is sickness
To worship it, is death.
To fear it, is wisdom.
To resist it not, is redemption
God dwells behind the sun, the devil behind the night. What god brings
forth out of the light the devil sucks into the night. But Abraxas is
the world, its becoming and its passing. Upon every gift that comes from
the god-sun the devil lays his curse.
Everything that you entreat from the god-sun begets a deed of the devil.
Everything that you create with the god-sun gives effective power to
the devil.
That is terrible Abraxas.
It is the mightiest creature, and in it the creature is afraid of itself.
It is the manifest opposition of creatura to the pleroma and its nothingness.
It is the son's horror of the mother.
It is the mother's love for the son.
It is the delight of the earth and the cruelty of the heavens.
Before its countenance man becomes like stone.
Before it there is no question and no reply.
It is the life of creatura.
It is the operation of distinctiveness.
It is the love of man.
It is the speech of man.
It is the appearance and the shadow of man.
It is illusory reality.
Now the dead howled and raged, for they were unperfected.