137 - Arthur I. Miller [72]
As Pauli opens himself up to allow these different parts of his being to appear, he is also exposing himself to danger. Emerging out of the unconscious, the anima is imbued with tendencies which, when brought to conscious life, may manifest themselves as antisocial behavior. Men normally resist the urgings of their animas, which are often the cause of trouble. But to repress such tendencies could result in the development of a neurosis.
Jung insists that mythology—and its descendent, alchemy—requires the female element to emerge from darkness to become the fourth entity. This will set the stage for the union of irreconcilable opposites—man and woman—symbolizing every primordial opposing pair, such as brother and sister.
To illustrate this, he tells a story. The Babylonian creation myth, the “Enuma Elish,” describes a matriarchal world ruled by the goddess Tiamat, the salt water, who represents the unfathomably deep ocean—chaos. Tiamat was murdered by her grandson Marduk in an act of unimaginable violence. The result, says Jung, was a shift in the world’s consciousness toward the masculine, casting femininity into the darkness of the unconscious. Pagan and Christian myths, alchemy, and Eastern religions denote odd numbers as masculine. Thus in Christianity the masculine Trinity, three, is also the One. Even numbers, conversely, are feminine. The time has now come to release the feminine unconscious, to create balance by turning three into four.
Pauli is now ready to plunge into the sea of the unconscious. But he still feels an unbearable tension between the conscious and the unconscious, rationality and irrationality.
The square
Then one night Pauli has a terrifying nightmare. People circulate around a square formed by four serpents. As they walk they must let themselves be bitten at each of the four corners by foxes and dogs. Pauli is also bitten. In the center of the square, a ceremony is going on to transform animals into men. Two priests touch a shapeless animal lump with a serpent, transforming it into a human head.
Jung is elated that Pauli has dreamed of a square for the first time. He presumes that it arose from the circle as a result of the four people who appeared in Pauli’s earlier dreams. Like the space enclosed by the Uroboros serpent, Jung says, the square is a temenos, a stage, a protected area where the drama can be played out.
In the dream of the ape-man, Pauli was threatened by a monstrous ape and saved by his intellect in the form of a Mephistopheles figure. Jung interprets this new dream to mean that man, in the prehuman state of his animal ancestors—the shapeless animal lump—is about to be created anew. Pauli is about to be reborn.
The leftward march of the people around the square signifies that Pauli is now focused on the center. He is moving toward centering the psyche, toward individuation, reaching toward his unconscious. Alchemical parallels enter Pauli’s dreams, permitting a creative play of images as a way of fusing the apparent irreconcilables of the conscious and the unconscious. This fusion is represented by the alchemical marriage, the coniunctio, the union of opposites: fire and water, man and woman, yang and yin.
Archetypal images depict the alchemical marriage as sexual union. Pauli can now sense the alchemical opposition between three and four, the trinity and the quaternity. Jung tells Pauli the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, spoken seventeen centuries ago: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes One as the fourth.” Pauli’s psychological journey—a story of threes and fours—is