Abraxas, the deity named on these Gnostic gems, is from the Basilidean Gnostic system. The Greek letters of the name sum, by isopsephy, to 365 — the number of heavens in Basilides’s cosmology and the days of the year. Carl Jung used Abraxas in his Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (1916), the strange Gnostic-poetic work that came out of the period of his Red Book visions. Hermann Hesse’s Demian (1919) gave the name a wider literary life: “the bird fights its way out of the egg… the egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The god’s name is Abraxas.”