Four Directions

the archetypal constellation would be at the base of the psyche; this is the structural tendency to develop four functions. You can find this archetype in mythologies of four persons, in the four directions of the compass, in the four winds, in the four angels at the four corners of the world.

Von Franz argues that the Four Directions of the compass are a mythological manifestation of the deep archetypal structure underlying Jung's four psychological functions, grounding the typological model in a universal psychic disposition.

Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013thesis

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whenever the emphasis of the tale is on establishing an orientation, or an order, there are four creators: the four pillars of the world, the four directions of heaven, four helpers of the Godhead, etc.

Von Franz distinguishes the quaternary schema — including the Four Directions — as the archetypal mode for establishing order and total orientation, in contrast to triadic groupings that express dynamic creative flow.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995thesis

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the winds of the four directions are also deeply associated with the cyclical, spatial sense of time... 'Circling, I complete the four quarters and the time.' The four quarters embrace all that are in the world and all that are in the sky.

Abram demonstrates, through Lakota shamanic testimony, that the Four Directions constitute a ceremonial framework uniting cosmic space and cyclical time into a totality addressed through circular ritual gesture.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

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not only does the world radiate from a center, but it is geometrically organized into four quarters. It is a circle divided by a cross. The Egyptian pyramids — themselves images of the central Mound — were oriented toward the four compass points, toward 'the four quarters.'

Moore establishes the pan-cultural ubiquity of four-directional cosmological organization — from Mesopotamian kingship to Egyptian pyramid construction to Native American cosmology — as evidence of a universal archetypal schema.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990thesis

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Like the four seasons and the four quarters of heaven, the four elements are a quaternary system of orientation which always expresses a totality... The orienting system of consciousness has four aspects, which correspond to four empirical functions: thinking, feeling, sensation (sense-perception), intuition. This quaternity is an archetypal arrangement.

Jung directly equates the four quarters of heaven with the four psychological functions, identifying the quaternary system of spatial orientation as the archetypal model for the structure of conscious orientation itself.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis

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from a center, the four horizons are projected in the four cardinal directions. The Roman mundus was a circular trench divided into four parts; it was at once the image of the cosmos and the paradigmatic model for the human habitation.

Eliade situates the Four Directions within his axis mundi framework, showing that the projection of four horizons from a sacred center is an archaic and cross-culturally disseminated cosmological schema tied to the founding of world order.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting

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In this sand painting what you get are the four directions, the colors associated with each of the four directions, and the center. The center is dark, the abysmal dark out of which all things come and back to which they go.

Campbell reads Navaho sand painting as a cosmological diagram in which the Four Directions radiate from a dark primordial center, structuring the sanctified landscape as a mandala of mythological orientation.

Campbell, Joseph, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990supporting

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there are companies of gods and goddesses who are arranged according to the four directions and are distinguished by typical mystic colours. It gradually becomes clearer that all these deities are organized into mandalas, or circles, containing a cross of the four colours.

Evans-Wentz's Bardo Thodol commentary shows that the Four Directions structure the Tibetan mandala of peaceful and wrathful deities, with each direction coordinated with a specific color and aspect of wisdom.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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Four is complete in that it stands for the four-gated city, the four directions, the four rivers of Paradise, the four seasons, the four letters of the Holy Name, the four horses of the sun carriage, and the four strings of the sistrum.

Bly catalogs the symbolic completeness carried by the number four — the Four Directions foremost among its instantiations — to argue that three-foldness represents an incomplete, deficient state of psychic and mythological wholeness.

Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting

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Enoch takes a series of journeys through earth and hell, going in the four directions. This represents a characteristic peregrinatio. It's a circumambulation of the whole circumference of the world that involves again a quaternity because it is a visiting of each of the four directions in turn.

Edinger interprets Enoch's journey in the four directions as a quaternary circumambulation — a peregrinatio that psychologically enacts the individuation-through-totality that the fourfold spatial schema symbolically mandates.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung's Answer to Job, 1992supporting

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the Hactcin themselves began to do something. They sent for thunder of four colors, from the four directions, and these thunders brought clouds of the four colors, from which rain fell.

Campbell's Apache creation myth demonstrates the ritual invocation of the Four Directions as cosmogonic powers, each color-coded direction summoning elemental forces that cooperate in the founding of the natural and human world.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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The directions are East (above), North (left), West (below), and South (right). The birds atop the trees are, respectively, a quetzal, an eagle, a colibri bird, and a parrot; the colors of the trees are turquoise blue, blue, white, and half-blue, half-white.

Campbell's analysis of the Aztec five-world-directions diagram demonstrates the elaborate iconographic encoding of the Four Directions — with associated colors, birds, day signs, and elemental powers — as a total cosmological map.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting

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Four is also a number connected with the creation of man... the number four symbolizes man's orientation to reality as a human being. One pictorial representation of the number four is a square, symbolic of the order superimposed by Logos.

Nichols situates the quaternary — of which the Four Directions is a primary spatial expression — as the fundamental symbol of humanity's orientation to reality, connecting cosmological structure to the Logos-ordered creation of the human being.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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the problem of the four functions always appears in an individual in a certain setup, but that there are general basic trends underneath... it seems to be an inborn disposition of the human being to build up a four-functional conscious system.

Von Franz argues that the fourfold patterning expressed in the Four Directions and comparable quaternities reflects an inborn archetypal disposition of human consciousness, more fundamental than any individual typological configuration.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting

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This Wind may be sent from one of the four directions along the horizon, or from the Sun, or the Moon, or from the Ground itself — indeed from any natural phenomenon.

Abram describes the Navajo understanding of the Holy Wind as arriving from any of the Four Directions, making directional orientation integral to the pneumatic and psychic constitution of the individual person.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting

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the powers represented in these four correspond to the very elements hypothesized by the Greek philosopher Empedocles as the 'roots,' ritsomata, of all things... four distinct prehistoric and precosmic ages of the Mexicans, each oriented toward a different direction of the heavens.

Campbell highlights Seler's observation that Aztec four-directional cosmology — each direction oriented toward a mythological age and element — parallels Empedoclean elemental theory, suggesting a deep structural convergence in human symbolic thought.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting

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the idea of the four functions is an archetypal model for looking at things... Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist, once said something which seems to me very convincing, namely that no new theory, or new fruitful invention in the field of science, has ever been put forth without the working of an archetypal idea.

Von Franz frames Jung's four-function model — whose spatial analogues include the Four Directions — as an archetypal idea in Pauli's sense, a structuring pattern that enables productive scientific and psychological theorization.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993aside

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Circles and squares drawn from a common centre appear in ancient Italy as well as in the Buddhist East as the ground-plan par excellence on which everything is built. Upon it all the little worlds — cities and shrines — are constructed, since both macrocosm and microcosm, Man, appear to be grounded on that.

Kerenyi and Jung trace the mandala's cross-and-circle ground plan — the spatial matrix of the Four Directions — to a universal cosmological and anthropological template organizing sacred architecture from Java to ancient Italy.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949aside

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