FOURNESS

The Sun and The Moon 

both create A Shadow.

“Gawain, a Third Knight, asks Parsifal gently and humbly if he will come to Arthur’s court and Parsifal agrees.

In another version of the story, the sun melts the snow and obliterates two of the drops of blood relieving Parsifal of the spell so that he can function again. It is possible that Parsifal would still be there in his lover’s trance if the sun had not reduced the three drops of blood to one or if Gawain had not rescued him.

Curious symbolism is at work in this part of the story. When dreams or myth make much point of numbers it is certain that very deep parts of the collective unconscious are at work. Do you remember the great emphasis on four in the Grail castle? Here it is the number three which is highly accentuated. Four seems to be the language of the collective unconscious for peace, wholeness, completion, tranquility. 

Three is the symbol for urgency, incompleteness, restlessness, striving, accomplishment. Parsifal, having been profoundly touched by the fourness of the Grail castle now must cope with the threeness of here-and-now life. His loves, the knightly quest, his place in Arthur’s court—these here-and-now things claim him. No one can make his way back to the Grail castle until he has made his way through the human dimensions of life.

An awkward time comes when life is dominated by three; it must be reduced to one or increased to four. Three, or that consciousness represented by three, can not long be endured in its intensity and drivenness. If one finds himself in a paralyzing dilemma, he must make the forward thrust to attain an enlightened place of insight, the fourness, or else reduce his consciousness just to survive.

Dr. Jung spent much of his later years working at the symbolism of three and four. He felt that mankind was just evolving from that stage of consciousness represented by three to that represented by four. 

In 1948 and 1949 he was jubilant at the new dogma of The Catholic Church which placed The Virgin Mary with the Trinity, all masculine figures, in Heaven. 

He felt that this completed an earlier, incomplete stage of development that had brought so much unrest and conflict to The  Western World. 

The Symbol precedes the fact by many years, which indicates that The Possibility is now open to us; but The Work is not yet done. 

Dr. Jung felt that the work of a truly modern person was to make the expansion of consciousness represented by the evolution from three to four — from the consciousness devoted to doing, working, accomplishing, progressing to that characterized by peace, tranquility, existential being. 

The heart of the matter is that four can contain three, but three can not contain four. 

A Person of the high consciousness of Four is capable of all the practicalities of life but is not bound by them. 

A Person of The World of Three is not capable of appreciating the elements associated with the number four.

We are apparently in an age where the consciousness of man is advancing from a trinitarian to a quaternarian view. This is one possible and profound way of appraising the extreme chaos our world is now in. 

One hears many dreams of modern people, who know nothing consciously of this number symbolism, dreaming of three turning into four. 

This suggests we are going through an evolution of consciousness from the nice orderly all-masculine concept of reality, the trinitarian view of God, toward a quaternarian view that includes the feminine as well as other elements that are difficult to include if one insists on the old values.

It seems that it is the purpose of evolution now to replace an image of perfection with the concept of completeness or wholeness. Perfection suggests something all pure, with no blemishes, dark spots or questionable areas. Wholeness includes the darkness but combines it with the light elements into a totality more real and whole than any ideal. This is an awesome task, and the question before us is whether mankind is capable of this effort and growth. Ready or not, we are in that process.

The Year of Mary has come and gone and has mostly been forgotten and seems to have had little immediate effect on our lives. But if we can view this extraordinary event in the right way it will have a profound effect on theology and upon our everyday lives.

When the fourth element is given dignity and honour it is no longer The Adversary; it is only when we exclude a psychological truth that it becomes negative or destructive. An element showing its evil side needs only consciousness to give it a useful place in our structure.

Man has often seen The Dark Side of himself as Feminine and, pushing it even further away, has turned it into The Witch. 

Much of the darkness of the rejected element during the Middle Ages was Feminine—hence the burning of witches at the stake. 

These were not a few isolated occurrences that gained unwarranted publicity; it has been estimated that more than four million women were burned at the stake during the height of the counterreformation in Europe.

Now, it is a formidable task to incorporate into Our Personality those elements that were seen to be so dark only a short time ago; to retrieve so dark an element is a dangerous operation. 

If one has antagonised The Wolf at The Door, he does not suddenly open The Door and Say, “Now come in.”

Excerpt from: 

"He: Understanding Masculine Psychology" 

by Robert A. Johnson