Quaternity occupies a central and irreducible position in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as an empirical datum of the unconscious and as a universal archetype of wholeness. Jung's treatment is insistent and wide-ranging: the quaternity appears in dreams, mandalas, alchemical symbolism, Gnostic speculation, number theory, and theological controversy, always as the psyche's spontaneous schema for organizing a totality that resists reduction to three. The decisive tension in the literature runs between Trinity and quaternity — the Christian privileging of three against the unconscious's persistent return of four. Jung reads this as a symptom of the repression of the fourth principle: the feminine, the material, the shadow, the devil. The incorporation of Mary into the Godhead through the dogma of the Assumption is treated as the unconscious's compensatory correction of that exclusion. Edinger extends these arguments, distinguishing quaternity as the symbol of completed wholeness from trinity as the symbol of dynamic process, while von Franz illuminates the persistent oscillation between three and four across alchemical tradition. The marriage quaternio, the axiom of Maria, Gnostic organizing schemas, and the fourfold structure of psychological functions are all treated as expressions of one underlying archetypal demand. The stakes are anthropological as much as theological: the quaternity is the psyche's map of itself.
In the library
21 substantive passages
I use the term "quaternity" for the mandala and similar structures that appear spontaneously in dreams and visions, or are "invented" (from invenire = to find), to express a totality (like four winds and seasons or four sons, seraphim, evangelists, gospels, four-fold path, etc.).
Jung provides his canonical definition of quaternity as the spontaneously arising psychic image of totality, grounding it empirically in dreams and visions rather than in metaphysical postulation.
Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976thesis
the central Christian symbolism is a Trinity, the formula presented by the unconscious is a quaternity. In reality the orthodox Christian formula is not quite complete, because the dogmatic aspect of the evil principle is absent from the Trinity.
Jung identifies the structural incompleteness of the Trinity as the psychological motive for the unconscious's compensatory production of the quaternity, which incorporates the fourth, excluded principle — evil.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
The idea of a quaternity of divine principles was violently attacked by the Church Fathers when an attempt was made to add a fourth — God's "essence" — to the Three Persons of the Trinity. This resistance to the quaternity is very odd, considering that the central Christian symbol, the Cross, is unmistakably a quaternity.
Jung exposes the paradox whereby the Church repressed the quaternity doctrinally while perpetuating it symbolically through the Cross, reading this contradiction as evidence of an unresolved psychological tension within Christianity.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
The quaternity is an organizing schema par excellence, something like the crossed threads in a telescope. It is a system of co-ordinates that is used almost instinctively for dividing up and arranging a chaotic multiplicity.
Jung characterizes the quaternity as an innate cognitive and psychic ordering schema, functioning archetypally wherever consciousness imposes structure on undifferentiated multiplicity.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
what we today call the schema of functions is archetypally prefigured by one of the oldest patterns of order known to man, namely the quaternity.
Jung demonstrates that the psychological theory of four orienting functions of consciousness is not an arbitrary construction but the modern form of an immemorial archetypal pattern.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis
The Pythagorean quaternity was a natural phenomenon, an archetypal image, but it was not yet a moral problem, let alone a divine drama. Therefore it "went underground." ... from there threw up the heretical notion of the quaternity and the speculations of Hermetic philosophy.
Jung traces the historical suppression of the quaternity from Pythagorean natural philosophy through Christian trinitarian theology into the underground tradition of Hermetic and alchemical speculation.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
the quaternity is the sine qua non of divine birth and consequently of the inner life of the trinity. Thus circle and quaternity on one side and the threefold rhythm on the other interpenetrate so that each is contained in the other.
Edinger argues that quaternity and trinity are not opposed but mutually constitutive: the trinity requires quaternity for its own inner life, pointing toward a higher synthesis of three and four.
Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972thesis
The apotropaic significance of the quaternity is borne out by Ezekiel 9:4, where the prophet, at the behest of the Lord, sets a cross on the foreheads of the righteous to protect them from punishment. It is evidently the sign of God, who himself has the attribute of quaternity.
Through biblical amplification, Jung establishes the quaternity's ancient protective and divine significance, linking God's own attribute to the fourfold form instantiated by the cross.
Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
From the circle and quaternity motif is derived the symbol of the geometrically formed crystal and the wonder-working stone. From here analogy formation leads on to the city, castle, church, house, and vessel.
Jung traces the symbolic genealogy of the quaternity into a wide array of cultural and architectural forms, demonstrating its generative power as the root image from which numerous wholeness symbols derive.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
it could even be called the archetype of wholeness. Because of this significance, the "quaternity of the One" is the schema for all images of God, as depicted in the visions of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Enoch.
Jung elevates the quaternity to the status of the archetype of wholeness itself, positioning it as the universal schema underlying all theophanic imagery across cultures.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
the king, being Christ, is at the same time the Trinity, and that the introduction of a fourth person, the Queen, makes it a quaternity. The royal pair represents in ideal form the unity of the Two under the rule of the One.
Through analysis of a medieval visionary text, Jung shows how the unconscious spontaneously generates a quaternity by adding the feminine fourth to the masculine Trinity, expressing the coniunctio as psychic wholeness.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
side by side with the distinctive leanings of alchemy (and of the unconscious) towards quaternity there is always a vacillation between three and four which comes out over and over again.
Von Franz documents the persistent oscillation between three and four in alchemical texts, interpreting it as a structural reflection of the psyche's ambivalence between dynamic process (trinity) and completed wholeness (quaternity).
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting
Above it rises the Anthropos quaternity, an expression of ideal wholeness at the spiritual level. This is symbolized by the Gnostic Anthropos or Higher Adam, an ideal figure.
Stein explicates Jung's stacked quaternio schema from Aion, showing how multiple quaternities organize the Self's structure from spiritual to material poles, with each quaternity representing a level of psychic reality.
Stein, Murray, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
two pairs of opposites, making a quaternio (p³ + p²q + pq² + q³), are needed to represent physical reality. Here we meet, at any rate in veiled form, the dilemma of three and four alluded to in the opening words of the Timaeus.
Jung links the mathematical structure of the quaternio to Plato's Timaeus, arguing that physical reality requires two pairs of opposites — a fourfold structure — to be adequately represented.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
you would have the sun above and behind the male figure, and the moon above and behind the female figure — sun and moon representing the archetypal masculine and feminine principles which lie behind the masculine and feminine egos of woman and man respectively. Then we have what Jung, in 'The Psychology of the Transference,' calls the marriage quaternio, the fourfold structure.
Edinger explicates the marriage quaternio as a specific application of quaternary structure to the psychology of relationship, integrating the archetypal masculine and feminine at both ego and archetypal levels.
Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995supporting
the initial state of wholeness is marked by four mutually antagonistic tendencies — 4 being the minimum number by which a circle can be naturally and clearly defined.
Jung identifies four as the minimum number required to geometrically define a complete circle, grounding the psychological primacy of the quaternity in a mathematical and cosmological necessity.
Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954supporting
The lapis quaternity, which is a product of alchemical gnosis, brings us to the interesting physical speculations of alchemy.
Jung connects the quaternity to the alchemical lapis philosophorum, showing how the fourfold structure underpins the physical and cosmological speculations of alchemical gnosis.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
The four forms of Hermes in Egyptian Hellenism are clearly derived from the four sons of Horus. A god with four faces is mentioned as early as the Pyramid Texts of the fourth and fifth dynasties.
Jung demonstrates the great antiquity of the quaternity as a divine attribute through Egyptological evidence, tracing the fourfold godhead back to the oldest stratum of recorded religious symbolism.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting
In this symbolic image we see, first of all, an indication of the quaternary in the cross, four lines being arranged so as to meet in a common point. Joined with the number 3, which denotes the moon, the sun, and fire, this [quaternary] will produce the number 7.
Pauli, drawing on Kepler's symbolic imagery, shows how the quaternary expressed in the cross combines with the ternary to generate higher harmonic structures, reflecting the archetypal interplay of three and four.
Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting
Three of the four orienting functions are available to consciousness. This is confirmed by the psychological experience that a rational type, for instance, whose superior function is thinking, has at his disposal one, or possibly two, auxiliary functions of an irrational nature.
Jung notes that only three of the four psychological functions are typically available to consciousness, with the fourth remaining inferior and contaminated by the unconscious — a structural analogy to the theological problem of the missing fourth.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside
Four animals also appear in the vision of Daniel. The first was like a lion and was 'made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to it.' ... All four of them are beasts of prey or, in psychological terms, functions that have succumbed to desire.
Jung interprets the four beasts of Daniel as a negative or daemonic form of the quaternity, illustrating how the fourfold archetype can appear in destructive guise when its contents remain unconscious.