Carl Jung: He is deceptive reality.

“Abraxas is the God who is difficult to grasp.

His power is greatest, because man does not see it.

From the sun he draws the summum bonum from the devil the infinum malum; but from Abraxas LIFE, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil.

“Life seems to be smaller and weaker than the summum bonum; therefore it is also hard to conceive that Abraxas’s power transcends even the sun’s, which is the radiant source of all vital force.

Abraxas is the sun, and at the same time the eternally sucking gorge of emptiness, of the diminisher and dismemberer, of the devil.

The power of Abraxas is twofold; but you do not see it, because in your eyes the warring opposites of this power are canceled out.

“What the Sun God speaks is life, what the devil speaks is death.
“But Abraxas speaks that hallowed and accursed word that is at once life and death.
“Abraxas produces truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Therefore Abraxas is terrible.
“He is as splendid as the lion in the instant he strikes down his victim. He is as beautiful as a spring day.
“He is the great and the small Pan alike.
“He is Priapos.
“He is the monster of the underworld, a thousand-armed polyp, a coiled knot of winged serpents, frenzy.
“He is the hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning.
“He is the lord of toads and frogs, which live in the water and go up on the land, whose chorus ascends at noon and at midnight.
“He is the fullness that seeks union with emptiness.
“He is holy begetting,
“He is love and its murder,
“He is the saint and his betrayer,
“He is the brightest light of day and the darkest night of madness.
“To look upon him, is blindness.
“To recognize him is sickness.
“To worship him is death.
“To fear him is wisdom.
“Not to resist him is redemption.
“God dwells behind the sun, the devil behind the night. What God brings forth out of the light, the devil sucks into the night. But Abraxas is the world, its becoming and its passing. Upon every gift that comes from the sun god the devil lays his curse.
“Everything that you request from the Sun God produces a deed from the devil. Everything that you create with the Sun God gives effective power to the devil.
“That is terrible Abraxas.
“He is the mightiest created being and in him creation is
afraid of itself.
“He is the manifest opposition of creation to the Pleroma and
its nothingness.
“He is the son’s horror of the mother.
He is the mother’s love for the son.
He is the delight of the earth and the cruelty of the heavens.
At his sight man’s face congeals.
Before him there is no question and no reply.
He is the life of creation.
He is the effect of differentiation.
He is the love of man.
He is the speech of man.
He is the appearance and the shadow of man.
He is deceptive reality.” ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 350.