Yesterday I started watching Tim Burton’s “Coraline,” an animated and well-polished movie about a little girl who escapes from her bleak family life by venturing to another world. She escapes by going into a flowery, indigo portal that she accesses with the help of a key made from a button. Interestingly enough, the button resembles the alchemical sign for earth (the cross circumscribed by the circle). At one point in the movie, a shadowy and enlarged version of the button eclipses the moon in Coraline’s “other world,” and everything starts turning white. I interpreted this “dissolving into the white” as the albedo stage in alchemy.
The four holes in the button also got me thinking about the worldly importance of the quaternary, or the importance of the number 4. As I sat by the computer today at work, I madly jotted down things that relate to the number 4. Here is the list (A list I made with a red/rubedo sharpie):
-4 hindu yugas (Satya, Treta, Dvapara, Kali)
-4 greek world ages (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron)
-4 cardinal points
-4 winds
-4 phases in the day
-4 lunar phases
-4 quarter notes in a whole note
-4 quarters in a game of football
-4 heart chambers
-4 sides to squares and rectangles
-4 sections to the vajra
-4 sections to the swastika
-4 sections to the cross
-4 DNA codons that help construct the genetic code (A, G, C, T)
-4 button holes in the movie Coraline
-4 parental guardian figures in the movie Coraline
-4 dimensions of earthy existence (3 external and 1 internal according to Einstein).
-4 major food groups.
-4 appendages in the make-up of the human body.
-4 quadrants in Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory of Everything.
This is obviously not a complete and definitive list, but it is a good start.
The Pythagoreans thought the number 4 was analogous to the qualitative existence of justice and order. Darryl just thinks the number was driving him bonkers all day.
More on this in the future.
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