137 - Arthur I. Miller [74]
A man of unpleasant aspect
Two days later Pauli dreams he is sitting at a round table with “a certain man of unpleasant aspect.” At the center is a glass filled with a gelatinous mass. The round table, Jung says, suggests wholeness. The man sharing it is Pauli’s shadow, his dark side, made up of all the qualities that he and others find so repellent. Pauli’s anima is absent. He has finally succeeded in separating his anima from his shadow. His recognition that his shadow is separate from his anima is an enormous step forward. His anima is no longer tainted with moral inferiority. She is finally able fully to assume her role as the mediator between the conscious and the unconscious. At the same time the amorphous mass, or prima materia, comes to life.
He dreams again. The vessel on the table is now a uterus, a symbol which stands for the alchemical vessel in which the chaos of the prima materia is transformed by degrees into the lapis, the Self. It is a moment of creation—the beginning of Pauli’s rebirth.
For Jung too the work with Pauli was a journey of discovery, of magical transformations. For both of them it was a way to enter “the no-man’s-land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious…the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times.”
Mandalas
FROM EARLY on in Pauli’s dream journey, circles had begun to appear as a pattern emerged. The first had been the serpent Uroboros biting its tail, which Jung recognized as a primitive form of mandala. The circle appeared again in a more developed form in Pauli’s dream of a perpetual motion machine. His nightmare of people circumambulating a square in which a human head is being created out of an animal mass took place not in a circle but in a square, which Jung interpreted as reflecting the four functions of analytical psychology, the four people of Pauli’s dreams, and perhaps also the four quantum numbers that Pauli had discovered.
Jung’s description of the philosopher’s stone—“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”—is also a description of the classic Tibetan Buddhist mandala. At the most basic level this is the ground plan of a stupa, a Buddhist temple constructed of a hemispherical mound within a square. Worshippers always circumambulate stupas in a clockwise direction, to the right; leftward motion is believed to be evil (hence the word “sinister”). Jung’s interpretation was that the right led toward the conscious and the left toward the unconscious. The picture makes it clear that the circle contains the square, the four points of the compass, and thus all of human life.
Lamaistic Vajra mandala. (Commentary by Jung in R. Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower [1949].)
As the mandalas in Pauli’s dreams became more perfect, Jung took this as an indication that he was moving closer in his psychic journey toward individuation—creating a healthy persona. Pauli’s dreaming and drawing of mandalas was a clear sign of a growing balance in the mind between the conscious and the unconscious.
Mandalas appear in cultures across the globe and deep into history—from Palaeolithic rock paintings, the mandalas of ancient Egypt, and medieval mandalas with Christ at the center and the four evangelists in the corners, to the sand paintings of the Navaho and the mandalas that play a key part in the religions of India, Tibet, and the Far East. The mandala can be a circle or a square, but it always consists of four objects symmetrically placed around a center that is the seat and birthplace