137 - Arthur I. Miller [73]
A temenos—a symbolic city representing the center of the earth, with four protecting walls laid out in a square. (Michael Maier, Viatorium, hoc est, De montibus planetarum septem [17th century].)
Marriage of water and fire, the union of irreconcilables. Each figure has four hands to symbolize the many different combinations of fours. (Ancient Indian painting; Nikolaus Müller, Glauben, Wissen und Kunst der alten Hindus [1882].) Psychic union of opposites. (Rosarium philosophorum [1550].)
Coniunctio—the alchemical wedding—is a symbol for the alchemists’ eternal quest to create the philosopher’s stone or lapis through the fusion of the four opposing elements. Pauli’s nightmare is an attempt to achieve individuation, like the alchemists’ striving for the lapis.
The primal hermaphroditic nature of man and woman—essential to Jung’s psyschology in which the female anima exists in man—relates to the four, the quaternary. The Rosarium philosophorum, a thirteenth-century alchemical treatise, provides a graphic account of this process. “Make a round circle of man and woman, extract therefrom a quadrangle and from it a triangle. Make the circle round, and you will have the Philosopher’s Stone.” Thus Jung explains it.
The conscious and unconscious have touched as the alchemical marriage takes place. Now they try to fly apart. But the magic circle traced by the walking figures in Pauli’s dream prevents the unconscious from breaking out; the conscious mind takes a stand.
Reflecting on the image of two priests creating a head out of a shapeless mass in Pauli’s dream, Jung shows Pauli a fifteenth-century image of God creating Adam from a lump of clay. Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of the image. Pauli is re-creating himself.
In his dream Pauli is bitten by foxes and dogs but this is a good sign, for transformations in the psyche require suffering.
As for the serpents in Pauli’s dream, rites of transformation involving serpents are standard archetypes. The serpent appears in Gnostic ceremonies of healing and in their representations of Christ, sometimes on a cross.
Squaring the circle to make the two sexes one whole. (Michael Maier, Scrutinium chymicum [1616].)
God creates Adam from the clay of materia prima . (Hartmann Schedel, Das Buch der Chroniken [1493].)
Jung sees the square formed by the four serpents as an archetypal ground plan revealing an ordering of the unconscious. But why four?
The basis of alchemy is the reconciliation of opposites. In Jung’s psychological theory of types, the least differentiated of the four functions remains in the collective unconscious; in Pauli’s case, it is the feeling function. The problem is how to fuse this fourth function with the other three.
When the feeling function emerges into consciousness it releases the Self. Since the inferior function signifies the feminine, the result is a wavering between masculine and feminine. The development of the symbols in Pauli’s dreams is a sign of the healing process.
Pagan rites of transformation in the Middle Ages. (Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, Mémoire sur deux coffrets gnostiques du moyen âge [1835].)
Left and right
Some time later Pauli dreams that a group of soldiers armed with antiquated rifles tries to prevent a revolution in Switzerland by “completely throttling” the left. When he is angry, Pauli tells Jung, he often threatens to “throttle” someone. Jung suggests that the soldiers represent the antiquated view that left is evil.
To find perfect balance, says Jung, left and right—the unconscious and the conscious—have to be like mirror images. Pauli needs to achieve this, to accept the conscious and the unconscious on an equal footing.
The night club
Shortly afterward Pauli dreams he is in a squalid night club. It is a place where feelings do not count, which makes him feel safe. It’s like the old days again. There are a few bedraggled prostitutes there. He argues with the unsavory proprietor about the meaning of left and right. He wants to find symmetry, but he is