Quaternity

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QUATERNITY

QUATERNITY , or a fourfold structure (together with its multiples—eightfold, twelvefold, etc.), expresses symbolically the nature of the divine and, by extension, describes the structure of the world that mirrors that divinity. Like the other great numerical symbols in its class, quaternity is impersonal; it may stand alone, or it may be associated with the attributes of a personal god. God is one, says Plotinus, and so is the truth of this world. The divine is dual, say the Zoroastrians, and thus one must choose between truth and falseness. Christians say that God is a trinity, a perception that explains for Augustine the threefold nature of human love. Yet others have experienced the divine mystery as a quaternity, and its reality can be dimly perceived in the world's four cardinal directions, the four seasons, the four elements, and the four temperaments of classical thought.

Something of this symbol's power can be seen in the boyhood vision of Black Elk, the Oglala visionary. He heard voices: "Behold him, the being with four legs!" The divine quadruped was a horse that turned in the four directions to reveal four sets of twelve horses of four different colors. These forty-eight beings went into formation, four abreast, and introduced the boy to the four Grandfathers, who were the powers of the four quarters of the world. Two other Grandfathers, the dual powers of sky and earth, were also present. This experience lasted twelve days, and for twelve days thereafter Black Elk felt homesick for his extraordinary "other world" (described in John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks, Lincoln, Neb., 1979). In this vision, the fourfold structure orders the religious experience and provides an image for the order of divine things.

It is, therefore, something of a surprise to learn that this North American medicine man disparages the square, a fourfold geometrical figure—especially in light of the fact that the Navajo Indians use squares, and quaternities generally, in the healing pictures called sand paintings. But Black Elk contrasts the square with the circle, which he finds more natural and thus more compatible with deity. The Navajos integrate the image of the circle with its geometrical "opposite," the square. The same is true for Tantric Buddhists, who make meditative use of an image called a maṇḍala. Tantric devotees imagine that the gods—often numbering a multiple of four, such as the thirty-two deities of the Guhyasamaja Tantra— reside in a square "palace" with four gates in the four directions; their residence, however, is surrounded by a "circle" (i. e., a maṇḍala ). Confucius, in his Analects (7.8), describes the proper way to teach a religious truth through an image that appears to be a square: "If I hold up one corner and a man cannot come back with the other three, I do not continue the lesson." Here, a whole truth is symbolically fourfold; further, there lies inside the fourfold structure of truth a distinction between three of its parts and a fourth. Navajo sand paintings are often bordered on three sides only; the eastern fourth side is left open, because evil cannot enter there.

Ezekiel's vision of God's chariot in the Hebrew scriptures contains a fourfold image that inspired Judeo-Christian symbolism. The prophet saw Yahveh—the four consonants of whose name, incidentally, comprise the mystical tetragrammaton of Judaism—supported by "four living creatures." They had four wings and also four faces, three of which were those of animals (the ox, lion, and eagle) and the fourth the face of a man. Their "spirits" were in the chariot's four wheels, which seem to have been intersected by four other wheels permitting them to move in four directions (Ez. 1). In the apocalyptic vision of the New Testament, God's throne is encircled at a distance by twenty-four other thrones; "round the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures"—like an ox, a lion, an eagle, but also like a man (Rv. 4). Irenaeus stated in defense of Christianity (Against Heresies 3.11.7–9): "The Gospels could not possibly be either more or less in number than they are," namely, four. He argued that the Gospel of Matthew is like a "man" while the other three are like an "ox," a "lion," and an "eagle." Perhaps it should be noted that, symbolism aside, these four fundamental documents of the Christian religion naturally divide themselves into a set of three—the so-called Synoptic Gospels—and the very different Gospel of John, which became the favorite of Gnostic heretics. Structurally, something similar can be said for the fundamental teaching of Buddhism called the four noble truths, the fourth of which is the Eightfold Path. Three of these truths describe conditions in the phenomenal realm of saṃsāra, but the "truth of cessation" alone describes the goal of nirvāṇa.

When Vedic seers of ancient India perceived the divine as an enormous person (Puruṣa), he was a quaternity: "All creatures are but one-fourth of him, three-fourths have eternal life in heaven" (Ṛgveda 10.90). Their vision lay behind the later and more impersonal view of the ultimate expressed by Upaniṣadic sages as ātman or brahman. According to the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (3.18.2), the divine has "four feet" or quarters—speech, breath, eye, and ear. But the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad develops the point psychologically and describes the ātman or self as comprised of four states of mind, three of which are waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep; the mysterious "fourth" (turīya ) state is the unity of the other three. When these matters are expressed in later Hinduism by anthropomorphic deities such as Brahmā and Śiva, the gods often have four heads as an optimum number. It is said that Brahmā once had a single stag's head when he lusted for his daughter; he was properly punished and lost his head, but then he was given the four heads one often sees in art. Or, he once had five heads but was too proud, so the number was reduced to four (Skanda Purāṇa 3.40.1–59; Śiva Purāṇa 3.8.36–66). Śiva, on the other hand, was not punished when he lusted after a celestial nymph who danced seductively; he had one head but, in order to see more, he increased the number to four (Mahābhārata 1.203.15–26). Perhaps the nymph's dance was the "dance of māyā, " or phenomenal life, which the Indian Buddhists say must be seen fully if one is to become emancipated. For that to happen, say the Mahāyānists, one has to experience the "twelve acts" of a Buddha, which include the critical "four visions" (of a sick man, an old man, and a dead man; but also of a monk). Then, on the night of one's enlightenment, one must have a dream that four birds of four different colors fly from the four directions, fall at one's feet, and turn completely white (Mahāvastu 2.136).

Bibliography

The quaternity image is so important to Carl Jung's Collected Works, 2d ed., edited by Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler (Princeton, N.J., 1968–), that one should consult them for materials and also for a psychological interpretation. On the problem of "three and four," however, Edward F. Edinger's essay on the Trinity in Ego and Archetype (New York, 1972) is exceptional. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's Śiva: The Erotic Ascetic (Oxford, 1981) relates the head symbolism in Hinduism to phallic symbolism. Alex Wayman's neat essay "Buddhism," in Historia Religionum, edited by C. Jouco Bleeker and Geo Widengren, vol. 2, Religions of the Present (Leiden, 1971), gives ample evidence of quaternities in the Buddhist religion.