Abraxas

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Abraxas — also written Abrasax — is a divine name out of second-century Gnostic teaching, built so that its seven Greek letters, read as numerals, add to 365: one for each day of the year, and, in the system that produced it, one for each heaven between the human world and the highest God. The number is the whole point. The name was made to carry it.

The earliest report comes from the church writers who set out to refute the Alexandrian teacher Basilides and his school in the second century. As they described it, Basilides taught a cosmos of descending heavens, 365 in all, ruled by an array of powers; Abraxas was the name attached to the principle governing that count, the great Archon of the whole graded series. Because the account survives mainly through hostile summaries, how Basilides himself understood the figure is genuinely uncertain — whether Abraxas was the supreme unbegotten God, a high ruling power below it, or chiefly a numerical cipher for the structure of the heavens. The sources do not agree, and the school’s own writings are lost.

The name had a second life independent of any school. From late antiquity survive hundreds of small engraved stones — carnelian, jasper, hematite — cut with a striking composite figure: a man’s body, the head of a cock, and two serpents for legs, usually holding a whip and a shield. The word ABRACAX or ABRASAX is frequently cut beside it, alongside other names of power. Scholars once called these “Abraxas gems” as if the figure on them simply was the god; the relation is looser than that. The stones belong to the broad magical practice of the Greco-Roman and early Christian world, where a name’s power lay partly in its sound and its number, and where Jewish, Egyptian, and Greek elements mixed freely. The anguipede and the name travel together often enough to be linked, not so reliably as to be equated.

A modern chapter reopened the name. In 1916 the psychologist C. G. Jung privately printed a short, deliberately archaic text, the Seven Sermons to the Dead, in which Abraxas appears as a power standing above the opposition of a good God and a devil — a being that contains and exceeds both, “effective” and “terrible” at once. Jung later treated the figure as material for his thinking about the union of opposites in the psyche rather than as a historical reconstruction, and his Abraxas owes more to that project than to anything Basilides is reported to have said.

What ties the strands together is thinner than the recurrence of the name might suggest. A teacher’s cosmology, a class of amulets, and a twentieth-century private myth each reached for the same seven letters, and each meant something of its own by them. The number stayed constant. The god behind it did not.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

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