The Pleroma

The word Jung borrowed from second-century Gnosticism for the Sermones: the "fullness" — undifferentiated, containing every pair of opposites at once, prior to and beyond the differentiated created world he called the Creatura. "Nothing and everything are alike appropriate" to it, the Sermones say, "since it has all qualities and no qualities."

⚠ AN OLD WORD REACHED FOR, NOT A KABBALISTIC ONE. Jung took Pleroma from Gnosticism, not from the Kabbalah he barely knew in 1916 — but the shape of the thing he needed a word for is difficult to distinguish from the Ein Sof, the Kabbalah's own name for the Infinite that precedes and exceeds every differentiated attribute. ▨ the unpaintable's own painters ran into exactly this wall trying to picture it. The resemblance is structural, arrived at from two different doors.