Customer Reviews

The Gnostic 3: Featuring Jung and the Red Book

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the third number of a new journal examining "Gnosticism in all its forms, ancient to modern". Each issue is book length, containing a wide variety of contributions. The current issue features a major essay by Lance S. Owens on C. G. Jung's visionary experience and the events that led to creation of the Red Book; it is titled "C. G. Jung and the Red Book: The Hermeneutics of Vision". (For this reason apparently, the cover is dedicated to C. G. Jung's guide, Philemon, as painted by Jung in his Red Book.)

The essay on Jung and the Red Book is alone well worth the price of the journal -- if you are interested in Jung, this is a must-read study. It is the best available introduction to a reading of Jung's Red Book -- interesting, informative, balanced, and highly readable. I give it 5 stars for this reason.

"The Gnostic" is the second major effort in recent decades to produce a regularly published journal dedicated to modern Gnostic studies. The first, Gnosis Magazine, began publication in 1985 and continued successfully with regular quarterly issues for fourteen years (back issues are still available for sale). Since the demise a decade ago of Gnosis Magazine no one has attempted a journal dedicated to the scope of Gnosticism in its modern resurgence.

The first three numbers of "The Gnostic" have been very interesting - this is a "modern generation, cutting-edge art and 21st century experience" approach to Gnosticism as a resurgent living tradition, a tradition with an ancient heritage and a transformative future. The articles on anime and avant-garde music push beyond the edges of my general interests, but then I am getting old -- and this is a journal for a new generation of Gnostics. Instead of attempting the moribund "advertisements and subscription" publication model, the publisher (Bardic Press) is wisely selling it on a per issue basis, and free of any advertising.

Years ago I used to write occasionally for Gnosis Magazine in the U.S., a magazine written about all sorts of spirituality at a high, but also highly readable level. Gnostic 3 is an occasionally appearing journal the size of a book that writes most specifically, but not exclusively, about Gnosticism.

What comes through strongly in the innate wisdom of the editor-in-chief, who is able to look at a variety of traditions and pull out what is true and important in them; his writers take their cue from the editor and approach the material with the same warmth and caring. I often tell students and patients that the various spiritual paradigms are like the scaffolding used to construct a building: very useful but then after the building is constructed you can take down the scaffolding. In order to do that, you have to recognize the building even as it's being constructed. Gnostic-3, its editor and writers, are able to do just that, which makes it a fine read for a variety of readers.

read harvard divinity school's karen king's "what is gnosticism?" describes the fraught political history of the use of that term -- you'll see how problematic any supposedly academically relevant work really is if it uses the terminology of "gnosticism" seriously...