Page 272 [272]
GYÖRGY ZOLTÁN Józsa
Before dying, in one manner or another, even if only by a looking into its own state,
it has the feeling ofthe presence of another world. At the silent urgings, the distant
calls, the dim rays of the Invisible, earth has already lost its solidity, and when the
soul finally escapes the cold body, joyful because of its deliverance, it feels itself
lifted in a great light toward the spiritual family to which it belongs.”
As we learn from the words of Prognost, Sinaret is “on the threshold of
hidden secrets,” the Aeromakh “has undergone all the stages of initiation
long before,” of which, in harmony with Pythagoras’ sacred Tetraktys, there
are four. The symbolism of the number four, having been termed “The Godly
Tetrasomia” in C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology,? features as a recurring
constructive principle governing the architectonics of Bryusov’s play: apart
from the slave, there are four dramatis personae, and the play consists of
four parts indicated by the numbering of scenes. The number four as the sign
of God symbolizes the apotheosis of the mortal. Sinaret, having undergone
the second stage — this is voiced by Gorgij —, faces the third stage of initiation,
the one which Schuré calls the “knowing of the other world.”
The era in Geistesgeschichte marked by the standing of Pythagorean
communities may have attracted Bryusov as something akin to his time for
numerous reasons. Pythagoreanism came from a complex of wanderings,
initiations, and real-life experiences of the founder of the religion. In his
book The Great Initiates, Schuré says: “His experience showed him
mankind threatened by the greatest calamities, by the ignorance of priests,
the materialism of scientists and the lack of discipline of democracies.”*!
The period following the foundations of the Pythagoreans’ academy is
famous for the treason of the poet Empedocles, who pronounced the secret
teachings of Pythagoras in his verse. If Pythagoras, who, as we learn from
Schuré, merged morality, religion, and science into a single system of
synthesis, personifies the ideal of Russian Decadents and Symbolists, who
rejected the Satanic world, seen by them as disintegrated due to the conflicting
3 Edouard Schuré, The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions. Blauvelt,
Steinerbooks, 1976, 332-333.
In his work Philosophical Tree, Jung, providing a reading of symbolic alchemy, lists
the semantic layers of the Symbolism of the number four and asserts a link to the making of
the lapis which is conceived as the unification of two conflicting principles (it is produced
from four elements): “The aim of the tetrasomia is the reduction (or synthesis) of a quaternion
of opposites to unity” [Carl Gustav Jung, Alchemical Studies, London, Henley, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981, 278]. The number four is the sign of God [ibid., 281], man’s wholeness and
the healing effect of unification (synthesis) is symbolized by the four corners of the cross.
Jung also states that this tradition of the cult of Tetraktys is deeply rooted in the teachings of
the Pythagoreans, and it dates back to Egyptian Antiquity [Ibid., 283]. By including the same
symbol in his work Aion, Jung demonstrates how it is associated with the status of reaching
into the depth of human consciousness, into the Self.
31 Schuré, The Great Initiates, 282.
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