Quaternity

The Timaean quaternity is the geometrical-proportional structure Plato gives at Timaeus 32B–C: “as fire is to air, so is air to water, and as air is to water, so is water to earth, and thus he bound together the frame of a world visible and tangible” (Plato, Timaeus 32B, cited in Jung 1958). The four elements are related by a continuous geometrical proportion that makes the cosmos “indissoluble by any other power save him who bound it together.”

Jung’s gloss in Psychology and Religion is the definitive depth-psychological reading: “one pair of opposites only produces a two-dimensional triad… This, being a plane figure, is not a reality but a thought. Hence two pairs of opposites, making a quaternio, are needed to represent physical reality” (Jung 1958). The Timaean four-element structure is therefore, for Jung, the classical root of the quaternity as the minimal structure of any physical reality and of any psychological wholeness.

The quaternity becomes load-bearing across Jung’s late work — in Aion (the four stages of the anima/animus development, the Christ-quaternio), in Mysterium Coniunctionis (the quaternio structure of the coniunctio), in the mandalas of Psychology and Alchemy. It is also the classical source for the alchemical quaternity of tria-prima plus caelum / lapis-philosophorum. Every four-fold psychological structure the depth tradition elaborates traces, at one remove or several, to the Timaean geometric proportion of the elements.

Relationships

• plato-timaeus
• tria-prima
• self
• coniunctio
• unity-of-opposites

Primary sources

• plato-timaeus (Plato, 32B–C)
• Psychology and Religion: West and East (Jung 1958)
• Aion (Jung)