The square occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychological corpus as a symbol of earthly manifestation, fourfold structure, and the tension between bounded form and infinite wholeness. Jung treats the square with exceptional seriousness throughout his writings: it appears in dream-series as a city square, a prison cell, a rotating room, a garden — always in dialectical relation to the circle. The central drama is the 'squaring of the circle,' that alchemical synonym for the magistery, in which angular imperfection is superseded by circular perfection, or alternatively, the circle is given concrete, terrestrial embodiment in four-sided form. Edinger extends this into developmental psychology, noting that the emergence of 'squareness' from the primal circle marks a differentiation of consciousness from unconscious wholeness. Black Elk's lament — 'there can be no power in a square' — is cited to illuminate the cost of that differentiation. Plato's Timaeus contributes the mathematical substrate: the square as the face of the cube assigned to earth, the most stable and immobile element. In astrological usage, the square aspect (90°) names a condition of dynamic tension between planetary principles. Across all registers — geometric, alchemical, astrological, cosmological, psychological — the square names bounded, differentiated, earthly reality straining toward reunion with the encompassing circle of the Self.
In the library
17 passages
The 'bed,' which before was a square, now becomes round like the full moon. The squaring of the circle, a favourite synonym for the magistery, has been accomplished. Anything angular is imperfect and has to be superseded by the perfect, here represented by the circle.
Jung reads the alchemical transformation from square to circle as the psychological completion of the opus, equating angularity with imperfection and the circle with achieved wholeness.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis
The square appears also, about the same time, in the form of a city square or a garden with a fountain in the centre... in connection with a circular movement: people walking round in a square; a magic ceremony that takes place in a square room, in the corners of which are four snakes.
Jung documents the systematic appearance of the square in his patient's dream-series, always in dynamic relationship with circular movement and the quaternity, as an expression of the mandala's fourfold structure.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
'It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square. You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.'
Edinger uses Black Elk's testimony to contrast the circle's primordial wholeness with the square's association with a differentiated but spiritually impoverished condition of consciousness.
Edinger, Edward F., Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972thesis
Suppose you or I wanted to represent in a geometric figure the idea of wholeness, unity, or totality: what more distinct symbol could we use than that of the square or circle? Both of these shapes have balance and harmony: the square because each side is equal in length to the other sides.
Sanford presents the square, alongside the circle, as a universal religious symbol of wholeness and harmony, appearing across world traditions as a mandala form.
Sanford, John A., Dreams: Gods Forgotten Language, 1968supporting
Painting of a medieval city with walls and moats, streets and churches, arranged quadratically. The inner city is again surrounded by walls and moats, like the Imperial City in Peking. The buildings all open inwards, towards the centre, represented by a castle with a golden roof.
Jung identifies the quadratic city as a mandala form in which the square arrangement of walls and streets orients all psychic contents inward toward the Self at the centre.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
Plato derives the human body from the four. According to the Neoplatonists, Pythagoras himself called the soul a square.
Jung cites the Pythagorean and Platonic identification of the soul with the square to ground the fourfold structure of psychic wholeness in ancient philosophical authority.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
Present a square cut into halves either diagonally or vertically... the original square has been lost, whereas the circle maintained its identity throughout... we choose instead to live in square boxes whose windows hold up pre-selected views for our inspection.
Nichols contrasts the square's vulnerability to dissolution when divided with the circle's indestructible identity, using this to argue that modern consciousness fragments reality by imposing the square's bounded perspective.
Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
'In the beginning it was square,' so says one of the sources, and was built of stone. The ceremony and mythology of the circle run counter to the traditions concerning the city of Romulus, which was called Roma quadrata.
Jung and Kerényi locate the square as a primordial form of the city's sacred ground plan (Roma quadrata), existing in creative tension with the circular cosmological mythology of the mundus.
Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
A place for the founding was marked out with 'a circle or a square,' and that four gates facing the four quarters were provided for.
The cross-cultural evidence of city-founding ceremonies using either a circle or a square with four gates demonstrates the archetypal equivalence and interchangeability of these forms in cosmological symbolism.
Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
The discovery of irrational numbers, arising during the study of the diagonal of a square... the diagonal of the square would then be the square root of 2, a result which was termed a logos arithmos, an irrational number.
Edinger interprets the Pythagorean discovery of irrational numbers through the square's diagonal as a psychologically charged revelation of the limits of rational thought, experienced by the ancients as a divine and disturbing disclosure.
Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting
The exact square-aspect measures to an angular distance of 90°. But two planets are also said to form a square when their angular distance measures to any value between, say, 85° and 95°.
Rudhyar defines the astrological square aspect as a 90° angular relationship between planets, situating it within a broader theory of planetary relationship as a determinant of personality-form.
Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
The Uranus-Pluto square that occurred halfway between the opposition of the French Revolution and the conjunction of the 1848 revolutions took place between 1816 and 1824... precisely coincided with the great wave of Latin American revolutions.
Tarnas demonstrates empirically that the Uranus-Pluto square aspect correlates with historically specific waves of revolutionary transformation, treating the square as an archetypal timing signature for Promethean-Plutonic energies.
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
When reviewing the distinctive pattern of correlations for the Uranus-Pluto cycle, I restricted our attention through much of that initial analysis to the two axial alignments, the conjunction and opposition, bringing in the square alignment only in the later sections.
Tarnas methodologically situates the square as one of four quadrature alignments in a planetary cycle, arguing for its inclusion alongside conjunction and opposition as an archetypal activator.
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
By 'planes' and 'solids' Plato certainly meant square and solid numbers respectively... the regular meaning of dynamis is square (or sometimes square root), and I think it is here used in the sense of square.
The Timaeus commentary establishes that Plato's geometrical cosmology explicitly uses the square as the fundamental unit of plane measurement, from which the construction of the primary bodies proceeds.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
To earth let us assign the cubical figure; for of the four kinds earth is the most immobile and the most plastic of bodies. The figure whose bases are the most stable must best answer that.
Plato assigns the cube — whose faces are squares — to earth as the most stable and immobile element, grounding the square's association with terrestrial, material reality in cosmological theory.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Adding a fourth point to the plane produces a three-dimensional entity, a solid; a solid represents position, magnitude, breadth and depth.
Edinger traces the Pythagorean sequence from point through line and plane to solid, implicitly situating the square (as plane figure) at the threshold between two-dimensional and three-dimensional psychic reality.
Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy aside
Kafka revolutionized twentieth-century fiction. Appropriately, he wrote a short story entitled 'Prometheus'... this unexpected twist of absurdity to the legend seemed especially appropriate for Uranus square Mercury.
Tarnas employs the square aspect between Uranus and Mercury in Kafka's natal chart to explain the author's revolutionary intellectual creativity and characteristic absurdist inversions.
Richard Tarnas, Prometheus the Awakener: An Essay on the Archetypal Meaning of the Planet Uranus, 1995aside