Tetractys

The tetractys is the Pythagorean figure of the first four integers arranged as a triangle — one, two, three, four, summing to ten — held in the Pythagorean school as the sacred emblem of the cosmic order: the monad of unity, the dyad of difference, the triad of harmony, the tetrad of material manifestation, together generating the decad in which the full range of number is contained. The Pythagorean oath is sworn upon it.

The structure encodes the ancient thesis that number is not a convention laid over the world but the generative principle by which the world is what it is — the position Plato inherits in the Timaeus and Plotinus elaborates in the doctrine of the procession from the One. For Jung, the tetractys is one of the classical anticipations of the quaternity as the archetypal figure of psychic wholeness — the fourfold structure in which the self presents itself to consciousness. See qualitative-number and quaternity.

Relationships

• number
• quaternity
• qualitative-number