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Most readers of Jung are aware that Gnosticism was important to his thought, but few of us have anything like Dr. Alfred Ribi's depth of knowledge of this extremely complex subject. The new English edition of Ribi's The Search for
Roots is a translation of a 1999 German edition. The book begins with a new preface by Ribi, in which he asserts in a classical Jungian style that the Gnostics were Christians who had an introverted attitude towards the new evangelium of Christ, and that Gnosticism reveals the undeveloped potential of the Christian myth. The book continues with a helpful forward by Dr. Lance Owens, who believes that Ribi is trying to open a dialog between Jungian and Gnostic studies. He notes that as well as the material available to Jung, Ribi has worked through in detail the Nag Hammadi Library, a set of texts found in Egypt in 1945.
The Gnostics were a large group of sects which flourished within the first two or three centuries of the Christian era. Their adherents believed they had direct knowledge of spiritual mysteries. Such groups had a wide variety of beliefs, to the extent that modern scholars believe the term ‘Gnosticism’ is too broad to be meaningful (Williams 1996). Gnosticism thrived during a time of serious disillusionment with politics and religion, not unlike our own time in which a new God-image is emerging.
Typical Gnostic mythology depicts this world as the product of a creator demiurge, the God of the Hebrew Bible, who is inferior to the transcendent divine. The demiurge rules a hierarchy of good and evil celestial beings. The Gnostics are metaphysical dualists for whom the spirit is trapped in matter, in the clutches of the demiurge, from which it must be freed. For the Gnostics, this evil world and its religious and social laws are not relevant to their plan of salvation, which is only for the favoured few. For them, salvation has nothing to do with good works or faith, but depends on transcendent knowledge.
Gnostics believed that the