137 - Arthur I. Miller [111]
Perhaps what catalyzed this line of thought for Pauli was that the tetraktys plus its mirror image make up the holy quaternity. Two equilateral triangles fused along one of their sides form not a square but a parallelogram, while laying two equilateral triangles one on top of the other produces the star of David. Pauli’s friend and former assistant, Markus Fierz—who was, we should remember, an acolyte of Jung’s—had argued along these lines in a letter he wrote to Pauli a month earlier where he represented the opposition of light and dark each with its own tetraktys.
Fierz’s geometric figure formed from two triangles, each a tetraktys.
The four-sided figure formed from the two triangles—one white, the other black—represents a state of the unconscious in which, Fierz wrote, light and dark “must either fly apart or flow one into the other,” as the unconscious (represented by the dark lower triangle) flows into the conscious.
The other case in which three and four occurred simultaneously had been in Pauli’s dream image of the world clock in which “three rhythms are contained.” However, since the “image of the zodiac is not yet correct, then also is the 12 ‘incomplete,’” Pauli wrote to von Franz. The zodiac is “not yet correct”—he felt, but didn’t know why. Perhaps the error lay in something Jung had missed in examining why the patriarchal view arose in Christianity: he had limited his clues to those within Christianity. It occurred to Pauli that the Zodiac had pre-Christian roots. He decided to look into the cultural history of something that Jung and his circle “too strongly neglected”—horoscopes. Even though Pauli had nothing but disdain for them, he saw their importance as a cultural artifact.
He discovered that the horoscope then in use was based on the zodiac of third-century-B.C. Babylonia. But this was a time when patriarchy had replaced matriarchy. So this zodiac is associated with the all-male Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost which, being three, is incomplete. The use of this patriarchical horoscope had much to do with the masculine slant of Christianity and so, too, its preference for the number three over four. Jung had been wrong to focus his attention on the Christian era in his search for the emergence of four from three.
Thus Pauli resolved the 2,000-year-old problem of how to go from three to four—to his own satisfaction, at least. In fact, he realized that the problem was more than 2,000 years old, harking back to Babylonian times and the venerable I Ching. Pauli’s liking for mathematical symmetry carried over to the I Ching, which, as he put it, exhibited “the exact symmetrical mental attitude of the pairs Yin (feminine, chthonic, dark = moon) and Yang (masculine, intellectual, light = sun).” Horoscopes, however, exhibited no such symmetries.
In Pauli’s opinion horoscopes “far exceed all rational thought” and so had no value at all. But the I Ching with its properties of synchronicity appealed to him “instinctively.” And he now knew, thanks to Jung, that intuition was the psychological function best suited to take in the whole situation.
Pauli did however once have a horoscope drawn up and included it in a letter he wrote to Jung in December 1953. It was not published in the Jung/Pauli correspondence and the two never discussed it in their letters. It is not known who constructed the horoscope and it is unlikely that Pauli attached much significance to it. Yet it may or may not have had something to do with Pauli’s statement to Jung that equinoxes were times of “relative psychic instability, which can manifest itself both negatively and positively (creatively).” In Pauli’s horoscope the spring equinox (the boundary between Pisces and Aries) is on the cusp between the seventh house, the “house of conjunction,” and the eighth, the “house of the unconscious” and the autumn equinox is on the cusp between the first house, the “house of the ego” and the second, the “house of material things.” One interpretation of Pauli’s instabilities