He is author of five books, all published by Quest Books: The Royal Road The Gnostic Jung and Seven Sermons to the Dead Jung and the Lost Gospels Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society, and Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing. He also taught special courses at the Institute for the Study of Religion (East and West) at the University of California at Los Angeles. In the early 1970's he became first associate professor and later head of the Department of Comparative Religions at the College of Oriental Studies in Los Angeles, a position he held for fifteen years. In 1952 he immigrated to the United States and has resided in Southern California ever since. Exiled from his native country as the result of the communist rule subsequent to World War II, he studied in various academic institutions in Austria, Belgium, and Italy. Stephan Hoeller was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931 into a family of Austro-Hungarian nobility. Hoeller goes on in his preface, "His sympathetic insight into the myths, symbols, and metaphors of the Gnostics, whom by his own admission he regarded as long-lost friends, continues as the brightest beacon of our day." For this reason he called for a renewed appreciation of this ancient tradition, and particularly for a return to the Gnostic sense of God as an inner directing and transforming presence." Dr. Hoeller states, "Jung knew that the one and only tradition associated with Christianity that regarded the human psyche as the container of the divine-human encounter was that of the Gnostics of the the first three centuries of our era. Indeed, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Library both contradict and complement accepted tenets of the Old and New Testaments.Īs to the connection with Jung, Dr. Hoeller shows, they rightly feared the documents would reveal information that might detract from unique claims of Christianity. The first team of analysts were mostly Christian clergy, who weren't anxious to share material that frightened church leaders. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in clay jars in Palestine by a goatherder in 1947, weathered similar storms. These did not appear in English for 32 years, because the right to publish was contended by scholars, politicians, and antique dealers. The Nag Hammadi Library consists of writings found by two peasants who unearthed clay jars in 1945 in upper Egypt. The "Lost Gospels" refer to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library, both discovered in the 1940s.
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