RIP Stephan Hoeller

💛

In 2018, I received an email from the Jung Society of Austin. I was not then, and still am not really, a Jungian, but I was on their email list like I was on all the other email lists of the local professional therapist organizations, so I could hear about seminars and workshops and the like.

In this email, the Society was announcing a visit to town by one Stephan A. Hoeller, who I had never heard of but the email said he had written a couple of books about Jung, and was coming to town to do a lecture, and they said “you don’t want to miss it!”

“Huh,” I thought. “That does seem interesting.” So I went.

That evening changed the course of my life.

I was wowed by Stephan Hoeller’s lecture. As I remember it he spoke on the distinction between esoteric and exoteric religion, and the need for both.

He was passionate, lucid … he conveyed ideas I had never heard before, and they made sense to me … and, importantly in my view, he had a sense of humor, which I generally take as an expression of being well-grounded and not an ideologue.

He was also 87 years old, if memory and math serve, and with an endearing Hungarian accent ... and seemed more than a little bit of an imp.

As it turned out, he was the Bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica, the oldest sacramental Gnostic church in America, and which had a parish in Austin. (The main parish being in Los Angeles, whence Hoeller hailed.)

I knew nothing about Gnosticism, but was startled that a guy like that was the bishop of a church.

Indeed, the local parish was the entity that brought Hoeller to Austin, and its main priest, Peter Reardon, who introduced Hoeller at the talk, seemed a similarly interesting guy, an independent spirit, and again, with a sense of humor.

Peter mentioned at the end of the talk that the parish did a Eucharistic mass every Sunday and that this Sunday (the lecture was on a Friday evening) Bishop Hoeller would be the guest celebrant.

“Huh,” I thought. “I’m gonna check that out.”

Coincidentally, several months prior, I had gone to a Catholic mass in Boston due to a professional vocalist friend of mine singing at the mass; for her it was a gig and I went basically to hear her sing. But in experiencing the mass I was kind of charmed by the magic and mystery of it ... and a bit jealous.

All the accoutrements and finery — the golden goblets, the colorful costumes — delighted my senses while the ritual seemed to convey at least vaguely some sense of the divine aspect of Being.

However, I wasn’t about to become a Catholic, hard-headed realist that I was, and still I suppose am.

But these Gnostics seemed different: there was an independence of mind and ... at risk of seeming highfalutin ... an ecstatic aspect that spoke to something deep within me.

So I went to that mass on Sunday.

And I liked it. I liked how they did the ritual.

I should say, some time later, I did a bit of church tourism if you will and I respect all sorts of different religious practices and denominations.

But at the time, experiencing this Ecclesia Gnostica ritual, the feeling I had was “this is religion with integrity.”

So I kept going. And have kept going, virtually every Sunday since that time.

I approached it like an exercise class, which accords well the Gnostic approach to religion: as primarily a “praxis” rather than a doctrine.

I still know fairly little about Gnosticism per se (the mythological, intellectual, and historical aspects) ... though I’ve read a few things since that lecture.

In any event, this past Sunday Stephan Hoeller passed away at the age of 94, and I think the world has lost one of its great lights at least in his human incarnation.

But perhaps his light will continue to shine...

• in the sacramental practices he worked so hard to establish (or re-establish) and which, according to Peter, was the most important thing to Hoeller as regards his work

• in the various books he wrote, perhaps especially his two books on Jung which help seat Jung in the Gnostic tradition (an extremely reasonable seating given that Jung more or less considered himself a Gnostic, and even wrote what amounts to a Gnostic Gospel)

• in his video-recorded lectures and homilies, and of course…

• in the church he established whose activities will continue

I’m really grateful to him for inspiring me on this journey — and inspire me he very much did, along with a couple other people who attended that lecture and started going to the church as a result and are still involved and friends to this day — since the ritual practices of the church, and some closely allied practices the church exposed me to, have made me a kinder and more loving person, without in any way extinguishing in me that feistiness and even contrariness of spirit that find no enemy in these spiritual neighborhoods.

I’ve noticed that if I speak of these subjects with others, it seems very often others assume my goal is to proselytize or convert or what have you ... so let me just add I have no goal of the sort, most of my best friends have no interest in these subjects, and indeed I believe it’s so important that every one listen to “the God within them,” so to speak.

Here my goal is just to pay tribute to this man who I really liked a lot and who I believe offered a great gift to the world ... in my way of seeing things, a “real” human....

RIP Stephan Hoeller and THANK YOU.

Hoeller with some Tarot cards.