Number is the most simple, the most primitive instrument of setting order.
In this chapter also belongs the role of numbers.
We know that eighty percent, if not more, of all mantic or divinatory methods are based on natural numbers.
You can, for instance, make a divination by reading the name of a person: you replace every letter of the name with the appropriate number.
This Kabbalistic tradition is still sometimes in use nowadays.
From the number combination you make your divination.
The Chinese I Ching is based on a number divination.
Throwing bones, as among the Africans, and similar practices are based on number divination.
The natural number plays the essential role in most of them.
Jung says in the same paper:
There is something peculiar, one might even say mysterious, about numbers. They have never been entirely robbed of their numinous aura. If, as a textbook of mathematics tells us, a group of objects is deprived of every single one of its properties or characteristics, there still remains, at the end, its number, which seems to indicate that number is something irreducible. (I am not concerned here with the logic of this mathematical argument, but only with its psychology!)
The sequence of natural numbers turns out to be, unexpectedly, more than a mere stringing together of identical units: it contains the whole of mathematics and everything yet to be discovered in this field. Number, therefore, is in one sense an unpredictable entity.
Although I would not care to undertake to say anything illuminating about the inner relation between two such apparently incommensurable things as number and synchronicity, I cannot refrain from pointing out that not only were they always brought into connection with one another, but that both possess numinosity and mystery as their common haracteristics. Number has invariably been used to characterize some numinous object, and all numbers from one to nine are “sacred.”
. . .The most elementary quality about an object is whether it is one or many. Number helps more than anything else to bring order into the chaos of appearances. It is the predestined instrument for creating order, or for apprehending an already existing, but still unknown, regular arrangement or “orderedness.”
This would mean, in simpler words, that the collective unconscious consists of simulacra, eidola in the Democritan sense, or images, which are not logically connected.
These images include a certain order or orderedness, an order of their own.
Number is the most simple, the most primitive instrument of setting order.
The first thing I do when I want to bring something into order is to count the objects; afterward there is more differentiation—I define the objects or their positions, but that is already more complicated.
If you want to have order with your sheep, you count them, then you might also separate the males from the females, and put some into stables and others not, but the most primitive way is to count them—if you want to dominate them mentally.
Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness; from it you can best tap the unconscious constellation.
This is probably why it is used in most mantic methods.
There is a lot more which is very mysterious, but this is where Jung stopped, hinting very strongly that there is an infinite amount more in this field to be found out.
All this is connected with the problem of the genealogies in cosmognoic myths because in certain gnostic and Neoplatonic cosmogonies, the archetypal chains are replaced by numbers.
Creation comes about, as it were, by two developing out of the one, and three developing out of the two, etc.
Or conversely, the natural numerical series reflects the law of organization behind every act of creation ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths, Page 326
primitive primitive primitive primitive
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