Carl Jung said :
"This is a god whom ye knew not, for mankind forgot it. We name it by its name Abraxas. It is more indefinite still than god and devil.”
- C.G. Jung
Here is an excerpt from Jung's Seven Sermons to the Dead from the Red Book - why here I hear you ask? Well in my professional practice as a psychotherapist and counsellor I was taught and indeed my professional supervisor for over ten years was a Jungian and he does continue to fascinate but it must be said he was completely bonkers! I think, (sic) it’s why I like him but seriously? Not so much!
"Hard to know is the deity of Abraxas. Its power is the greatest, because man perceiveth it not. From the sun he draweth the summum bonum [highest good]; from the devil the infimum malum [lowest evil]; but from Abraxas life, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil.
Smaller and weaker life seemeth to be than the summum bonum; wherefore is it also hard to conceive that Abraxas transcendeth 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 ye see it not, because for your eyes the warring opposites of this power are extinguished.
"Abraxas is the god whom it is difficult to know. His power is the very greatest, because man does not perceive it at all. He is magnificent even as the lion at the very moment when he strikes his prey down. His beauty is like the beauty of a spring morn.
To see him means blindness; To know him is sickness; To worship him is death; To fear him is wisdom; Not to resist him means liberation … Such is the terrible Abraxas … He is both the radiance and the dark shadow of man. He is deceitful reality.”
Abraxas, sequence of Greek letters considered as a word and formerly inscribed on charms, amulets, and gems in the belief that it possessed magical qualities. In the 2nd century, some Gnostic and other dualistic sects, which viewed matter as evil and the spirit as good and held that salvation came through esoteric knowledge, or gnosis, personified Abraxas and initiated a cult sometimes related to worship of the sun god.
Basilides of Egypt, an early 2nd-century Gnostic teacher, viewed Abraxas as the supreme deity and the source of divine emanations, the ruler of all the 365 heavens, or circles of creation—one for each day of the year. The number 365 corresponds to the numerical value of the seven Greek letters that form the word ‘abraxas’ C. Jung
File under Weird mystical tosh!