137 - Arthur I. Miller [108]
The audience of strangers is eager to learn more, but Pauli leaves and finds himself back with the piano teacher. He tells her that while giving the lecture he has produced a “child” for her. The “child” is a product of his unconscious indicating that the woman is indeed his anima, and represents a new holistic attitude—a fusion of psychology, physics, and biology. The problem is how to make it acceptable to everyone. The answer, Pauli realizes, lies in numbers. He suddenly notices that the teacher has Chinese eyes, like the Chinese woman who, in his earlier dream, had led him to the lecture hall.
A voice says, “Wait, transformation of the evolutionary center.” Suddenly the teacher has a ring on her finger marked with the mathematical symbol i—the square root of –1. She tells him that it symbolizes the oneness of the rational and the irrational. But Pauli sees another oneness: i is a key element in Schrödinger’s wave function in quantum physics. It describes the wave and the particle properties of matter and symbolizes the unity of wave and particle.
Pauli puts on his coat and hat. He is about to leave when he hears the teacher play a four-note chord. The three-note chord he played at the beginning of the fantasy has mutated into four. A wholeness has been achieved, a child has been produced, and Pauli’s thoughts are now focused on the archetype of number, particularly on three and four and how the shift from one to the other brings about a unity.
The two-thousand-year-old problem
Nevertheless, the great problem remained unresolved. As Jung put it, “Oddly enough, the problem is still the same 2,000-year-old one: How does one get from Three to Four?” Pauli’s own thoughts on this date back to his discovery of the exclusion principle and the “difficult transition from three to four.” That was really the main work,” he added. Now it began to lead him into other aspects of numerology.
Writing to von Franz, Pauli continued the introspective and numerical mode of The Piano Lesson: “One can not at all proceed from three to four.” As far as the 2,000-year-old question was concerned, he was stymied. But perhaps he could try a different approach. “However, one can proceed in various ways to three and four,” he went on. Then he had a brain wave. Four times three equals twelve; but twelve can also be expressed as two times six. He played with this conundrum at the start of his letter:
A. To the sign of 6.
B. 2 × 6 = 12
The professor who shall calculate numerically.
Twelve, he remembered was the number of constellations in the zodiac. “My path proceeds via 2 × 6 to the zodiac, since what is still older is always the newer,” he concluded.
In the zodiac, the twelve signs were divided into four triangles of three signs. So perhaps the zodiac contained the solution as to how to get from three to four. Perhaps its symbolism, focusing on the quaternity, was more in touch with irrationality than was Christianity, which emphasized the Trinity. Followers of Christianity, he wrote, were “cosmic babies, ‘greenhorns,’” their religion akin to the physics of people who “believe that the full moon and the new moon” are not the same moon.
Then he received a letter from his friend and one-time assistant, the physicist and Jungian disciple Markus Fierz. Fierz told him about a dream described by the sixteenth-century Cambridge Platonist Thomas More. In his dream, More glimpsed twelve sentences written in gold but he could recall only the first six. He was aroused from his dream by the braying of two donkeys.
Pauli set to work to analyze the dream. He reasoned that the splitting of the twelve sentences in More’s dream into two sixes, along with the two donkeys, rendered “the quaternity” impossible…. The natural splitting of 12 would be realized in 3 × 4, which also corresponds to the splitting in the zodiac (of which Fludd always spoke). But the time was not ripe for a quaternary world-picture, and the dark half relapsed into the unconscious.