Hi Gerald.

Thanks for the compliment. I've enjoyed preparing the series.

With regard to Gnosticism (and my personal liking for it), we have to be very careful to understand what someone means if they claim to be a Gnostic. Gnosticism is a term invented by later scholars to label certain groups, who at the time were independent of each other and wouldn't have recognised the term. They would probably have said that they were seeking gnosis, i.e. inner illumination, transformation of consciousness, something similar to the inner search of Hinduism and Buddhism. That is the sense in which I identify with them, and I assume that is also what Jung thought. He recognised that they were integrating and interpreting the images and visions emerging from the unconscious.

That said, these groups, or at least some of them, had similar beliefs. This enables the term Gnosticism to become meaningful in modern times. These beliefs involved elaborate cosmogonies and complicated mythologies, including the theology you mention. So Gnosticism is now considered dualistic, it believed that the material world is evil and was not created by the ultimate 'good' God, rather a lower figure known as the Demiurge, and so on. These are beliefs that I don't subscribe to, although it's possible to understand why they might have come to those conclusions.

All that said, it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There remains a lot of interesting material in the Gnostic texts, much of it still relevant to modern times, hence Jung's interest in it. You probably won't agree, but the most obvious example is the belief in the Divine Feminine.

For Christians the most important text is the Gospel of Thomas, in the Nag Hammadi collection discovered in the 1940s. This contains many purported but previously unknown sayings of Jesus, along with some similar to the Gospels.