137 - Arthur I. Miller [75]
Pythagoras saw the square as the symbol of the soul and in Gnosticism and Hebraism it shared the holiness of the four numbers of the Pythagorean tetraktys. In many religions the square has magical, protective qualities. Thus, for Jung four—not three—was the archetypal foundation of the human psyche. He wrote of how amazing it was that the unconscious should present the same images to people across the globe and across time.
Pauli’s first mandalas
Pauli first dreams of a distorted mandala. He tries to make it symmetrical, but fails. The horizontal arm is longer than the vertical one, which Jung interprets as a lack of depth—that the ego still dominates in Pauli’s psyche. Each arm of the mandala holds a bowl, which Pauli draws as circles. Each is filled with liquid. One is red, one yellow, and one green, but the fourth is colorless, for the fourth basic color, blue, is missing. (To alchemists the rainbow was made up of four colors corresponding to the four Aristotelian elements—red [fire], yellow [air], green [water] and blue [earth].) The mandala in Pauli’s dream is not only distorted but incomplete.
Nevertheless, the fact that Pauli is drawing mandalas is a good sign. In alchemy one of the ways to produce the fusion of opposites in the philosopher’s stone and the alchemical wedding is to create images. Pauli does precisely this in his fastidious recording of his dreams accompanied by his drawings. In Jung’s analytical psychology this shows he is grasping the inner essence of things and depicting their nature as accurately as possible.
Pauli’s distorted mandala.
In his scientific life Pauli was well aware of the importance of the visual imagination. In the 1930s physics was still in a “period of spiritual and human confusion,” as it had been in the 1920s when Pauli had begun to search for a new way to create the true image of the counterintuitive world of the atom. There was no visual image for Pauli’s fourth quantum number and this had helped to destroy the visual imagery of Bohr’s theory of the atom as a miniature solar system.
The world clock
Then Pauli has a dream that he calls “the great vision—the vision of the world clock.” It is an impression of “the most sublime harmony,” he tells Jung, and fills him with happiness and peace:
There is a vertical and a horizontal circle, having a common center. This is a world clock. It is supported by a black bird. The vertical circle is a blue disk with a white border divided into 4 × 8 = 32 partitions. A pointer rotates upon it. The horizontal circle consists of four colors. On it stand four little men with pendulums and around it is laid the ring that was once dark and is now golden…. The “clock” has three rhythms or pulses:
The small pulse: the pointer on the blue vertical disk advances by 1/32.
The middle pulse: one complete revolution of the pointer. At the same time the horizontal circle advances by 1/32.
The great pulse: 32 middle pulses are equal to one revolution of the golden ring.
But what does it all mean? Jung sees in Pauli’s world clock a bringing together of all the allusions in his earlier dreams in which its symbols appeared in fragments—the circle, the globe, the square, rotation, the cross, quaternity, and time. In this new dream there is perfect symmetry.
Pauli’s “world clock.”
Pauli’s world clock has three rhythms or pulses. First there is the small pulse of the vertical ring, which is divided into thirty-two segments. A pointer ticks around them one at a time. When the pointer has passed through all the segments, the middle circle advances by 1/32—the middle pulse. When the middle circle has undergone a complete revolution, “the great pulse occurs”—a single revolution of the golden ring.
The vertical blue circle intersects a circle divided into four parts colored red, green, orange, and blue. On each quarter stands a grotesque dwarf which