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In this episode, I reflect on the strange and unsettling figure of Abraxas — the god Hermann Hesse brings into Demianand Carl Jung explores in The Red Book and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. Abraxas names something deeper than a simple “good versus evil” split. He becomes an image of the mixture of reality itself: light and shadow, creation and destruction, spirit and instinct, the sacred and the terrifying.

I use Miguel Serrano’s Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships as a starting point, especially his reflections on Jung, Hesse, and Abraxas as a symbol of the total human being. But I also include a necessary warning about Serrano himself, whose later esoteric Hitlerism and fascist sympathies show how dangerous these symbols become when they are detached from humility, ethics, and compassion. Abraxas is not an excuse to worship darkness, violence, hierarchy, or purification. If these ideas lead us toward hatred or the eradication of other people, we are not doing depth psychology — we are being possessed by the shadow.

This episode is about trying to think carefully and responsibly with dangerous symbols, and asking whether wholeness means becoming pure, or whether it means becoming conscious enough to face the terrifying mixture of being human.