Number as Bridge to the Unus Mundus

The thread that carl-jung left unfinished at his death, and that marie-louise-von-franz pursued through Number and Time and Psyche and Matter, is the claim that number is the archetype in which the unus-mundus manifests. The unus-mundus — received from gerhard-dorn and the medieval Platonists — is the primordial psychophysical background “where there is no incommensurability between so-called matter and so-called psyche” (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, cited in Psyche and Matter). synchronicity is its creatio continua: “the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents” (Jung, cited in Psyche and Matter).

The mediating term that Jung and von Franz converge on is number. Jung told her shortly before his death: “I always come upon the enigma of the natural number. I have a distinct feeling that Number is a key to the mystery, since it is just as much discovered as it is invented. It is quantity as well as meaning” (Psyche and Matter). Number is indifferently psychic and physical — mathematically real, phenomenologically numinous, structurally the same in the genetic code, in the I Ching‘s hexagrams, and in the dream’s counting motifs.

Von Franz took the claim one step further: the natural numbers are not merely quantitative but qualitative, and their qualitative aspect expresses itself in time as the rhythms the divinatory systems read (see qualitative-number). The retrograde count of the I Ching, the Chinese mathematics of “temporal numbers,” Gödel’s call for a return to Platonism — each is, on her reading, a trace of the same insight. She was clear about her limit: “I was able to take this up to the number four. Then it became too complicated” (Psyche and Matter).

The thread remains productively open. The Lineage holds it as Jung’s and von Franz’s unfinished business.

Sources

• carl-jung: number as the key to the mystery; enigma that unites quantity and meaning
• marie-louise-von-franz: the qualitative aspect of natural number; temporal number as synchronicity’s mathematics
• gerhard-dorn: the unus mundus as the mind of God in which the alchemical opus culminates