When Gnosis Was a World Religion: Henri-Charles Puech and Gilles Quispel at Ascona

The talk will explore the scholarly cross-pollination between the experiential definition of “gnosis,” as it was promoted at the Eranos meetings in Ascona, under the auspices of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, and the discovery, publication, and analysis of two major corpora of late antique Egyptian religious literature, the Medinet Madi Manichaean codices and the Nag Hammadi library. The title of my talk alludes to Gilles Quispel ‘s 1951 volume Gnosis als Weltreligion; with it, I will try to uncover the personal and social soteriological aspects modern scholars ascribed to late antique religious literature during and immediately after WWII.