137 - Arthur I. Miller [88]
He had also missed seeing Carl Jung.
Dreams of Kepler
Once he was settled in Zürich, Pauli quickly got back in touch with Jung and sent him some dreams.
One of his first dreams, which he sent to Jung in October 1946, was about a “blond” man. In the dream, Pauli is reading an ancient book about the Inquisition and how it persecuted disciples of Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno, and also about Kepler’s image of the sun as a concrete symbol of the unvisualizable Trinity. The blond man tells Pauli that “The men whose wives have objectified rotation are being tried.” Then Pauli is in the courtroom with them. His wife is not among them and he wants to send a note to her. The blond man tells him that not even the judges understand what rotation means.
The blond man then says he is seeking a “neutral language” that transcends terms such as “physical” or “psychic.”
Pauli kisses his wife goodnight and tells her how sorry he feels for the accused. He weeps. The blond man says to him with a smile, “Now you’ve got the first key in your hand.”
Shaken, Pauli awakens. The essence of the dream, he thinks, is that men have lost touch with their animas—their female aspect, that is, their wives, for their wives, being cut off from the world of science, cannot understand the scientific term “rotation.” But what does this have to do with ancient science and with Kepler? Thinking through the problem, Pauli realizes that Kepler too did not fully understand “rotation.” Kepler’s image of the Trinity as a sphere is also a mandala. But, in the Jungian sense of the term “mandala,” it is incomplete in that it is made up of three, not four, elements.
Kepler’s image of the creation of the universe is a straight line emanating from the center, from God, like a ray of light emanating from the sun. Pauli’s analysis is that this line snags the surface of the sphere and as a result Kepler’s mandala is static and cannot rotate. It cannot be a true mandala until it is completed by the fourth element, the anima. This is why in Pauli’s dream his wife is absent in the court scene.
Beginning with Kepler, Pauli realizes, modern scientists deliberately excluded the anima (in the Jungian sense of the female aspect of their psyche) as they tried to mechanize the world, partially guided, perhaps, by the image of the Trinity, which they saw in the three dimensions of space. Fludd recognized that modern science’s emphasis on inert matter relegated human feeling to the depths of the unconscious. It is when Pauli weeps in his dream, expressing feeling, that the blond man tells him he has found the “first key.” Pauli recognizes Kepler and Fludd as opposing psychological types—Kepler the thinking type and Fludd the feeling type. Thus his knowledge of Jungian psychology has revealed to him the limitations of modern science.
Kepler, he thinks, saw the soul “almost as a mathematically describable system of resonators”—like Bohr’s virtual oscillators—rather than an entity that could be visualized. Fludd, conversely, focused on four, not three, and used drawings to communicate his beliefs.
It was as he was thinking through this dream that Pauli decided to look more deeply into Kepler and his work. Delighted with Pauli’s plan, Jung gave him alchemical literature, as did Panofsky. Pauli also corresponded with his one-time assistant Markus Fierz. Fierz had studied Newton, who was born twelve years after the death of Kepler, and pointed out that his concepts of space and time were saturated with religion; to Newton both space and time were relative to God.
What of Kepler’s era, Pauli wondered, when space and time had not yet been elevated to such heavenly heights? He was eager to go back to the moment when mysticism and alchemy clashed with the