Along with three and seven, four is a richly symbolic and mythic number that seems to turn up all over the place: four elements, four seasons, four directions, four dimensions (in our universe), DNA and RNA both have four bases . . . the list is long.
The number “four” figures prominently and frequently in our conceptual models, with Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants as a salient example. In light of all this, it seems safe to say that there is something deeply archetypal about the number “four.”
Michael Denton, in his excellent book Nature’s Destiny, even gives it a theistic twist: “It has often been said that God is a mathematician; on the evidence of molecular biology we might add that He is keen on the number four.”
So pervasive a principle deserves a name, and so I hereby christen these epiphanies of the number “four” as — Meta-Fours.
Here is an excerpt from Jung on what he calls the “quaternity principle,” which gives me grounds for believing that my enchantment with the number four is not entirely trivial, or should I say quadrivial?
“The oldest mandala drawing known to me is a palaeolithic “sun-wheel,” recently discovered in Rhodesia. It, too, is based on the quaternary principle. Things reaching so far back into human history naturally touch upon the deepest layers of the unconscious, and can have a powerful effect on it even when our conscious language proves itself to be quite impotent.
“Such things cannot be thought up but must grow again from the forgotten depths if they are to express the supreme insights of consciousness and the loftiest intuitions of the spirit, and in this way fuse the uniqueness of present-day consciousness with the age-old past of life.”
—Jung on Active Imagination, edited by Joan Chodorow
Meta-Fours are enshrined on the back of every dollar bill and you will find them if you contemplate the stars in the Great Seal. As Joseph Campbell observes in his book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space:
“In the radiant disk above the American bald eagle’s head the stars of the original 13 states are composed to form a Solomon’s seal symbolic of the union of soul and body, spirit and matter. Each of the interlaced equilateral triangles, one upward turned, the other downward, is a Pythagorean tetraktys, or “perfect triangle of fourness,” of nine points, four to a side, enclosing a tenth representing the generative center (“still point of the turning world”) out of which the others derive their force.
“The upward triangle is of spiritual, the downward pointing, of physical energy. Thus interlaced, the two represent the physical world recognized as informed by the spiritual.”
Over the years I have kept adding to my collection of Meta-Fours and I now have quite a number. Several friends share my interest and we have an ongoing game of coming up with puns, or word play, that involve the number 4. Here are four examples:
1. May the fours be with you!
2. Tour de Fours
3. A Mighty Fourtress Is Our Quad
C. G. Jung, a quadratic thinker who favored four over the number three, and therefore a Quaternity over the Trinity, would surely have liked the fourth example:
4. You can’t see the fourest for the threes.
HyC