Tell Us a Story from Before We Can Remember: Gnostic Reflections on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life can be considered in relation to the pansophic tradition of Western spirituality, especially Gnosticism. Malick explores humankind in a cosmic ambit that is imaginal, holistic, and deeply reverential, recalling the Gnostics’ use of mythopoesis in elaborating and evoking their revelatory experiences. This is exemplified by a haunting soprano voice within the void that is conspicuously Sophianic.

Jung's observation that psychology (like Malik's film) is concerned with an act of seeing, not the construction of new religious truths, invites reference to the roots of perception suggested by the visionary experience of a child, the initiatory dream of a young woman, and the archetypal correspondence of such constellations to the germinal stars–scintillae motif in Gnostic creation mythology, alchemy, and the pansophic tradition generally.