137 - Arthur I. Miller [77]
The clock on the blue circle sets the entire process in motion. This, says Jung, is because the Trinity is the pulse of the threefold rhythm of the system, which in turn is based on thirty-two, a multiple of four. The circle and the quaternity interpenetrate so that each is contained in the other: three is contained in four.
In a way it was not surprising that Pauli and Guillaume should have had similar visions, in that Pauli too was brought up as a Catholic. Throughout the Middle Ages the problem that hung over the Trinity was that it excluded the feminine. It makes sense that the missing color in Guillaume’s dream is blue, the color of the small undeveloped circle. Blue, of course, is the color of Mary’s cloak. It is Mary who is missing.
Guillaume was given this clue but he missed it. Instead he saw the King and Queen sitting side by side. But is not Christ the King also in himself the Trinity? Guillaume, a man of the Middle Ages, focused so much on the King that he forgot the Queen. Put the two together—King and Queen, Christ and Mary—and the result is four, a quaternity. Perhaps this was why the angel slipped away before Guillaume started asking awkward questions.
The problem for Guillaume and all the philosophers of the Middle Ages was to find the fourth. Perhaps Pauli’s vision provided “a symbolic answer to this age-old question. That is probably the deeper reason why the image of the world clock produced the impression of ‘most sublime harmony.’” wrote Jung.
As for the absence at the center of Pauli’s mandala, Jung concludes that it is “an abstract, almost mathematical representation of some of the main problems discussed in medieval Christian philosophy.” It is only through his knowledge of Guillaume’s vision that Jung is able to understand the connection of Pauli’s dream with preoccupations going far back into history.
But how could the concept of fourness—the quaternity—arise in the unconscious? The conscious mind could not have put it there. Jung concluded that there must be some element in the psyche expressing itself through the concept of fourness, driving toward the completeness of the individual. Jung emphasizes that the concept of fourness is found in prehistoric artifacts all over the world. It is an archetype often associated with the Creator—though, far from being a proof of God, it proves only “the existence of an archetypal God-image” within human consciousness.
A changed man?
Jung claimed that as a result of his analysis Pauli “became a perfectly normal and reasonable man” and even gave up drinking. He often spoke about the case of the intellectual young scientist as a prime example of the way in which his work on alchemical symbols had helped to shed light on the “development of symbols of the self.” It cast light on physics, too.
Two years after he first approached Jung, Pauli wrote to him describing how difficult it had been to cope with the very different but equally repellent parts of his personality before he started analysis:
The specific threat to my life has been the fact that in the first half of life I swing from one extreme to the other (enantiodromia). In the first half of my life I was a cold and cynical devil to other people and a fanatical atheist and intellectual “intriguer.” The opposition to that was, on the one hand, a tendency toward being a criminal, a thug (which could have degenerated into