3: three novels

I explained on first post how, on September 8, 2008, I woke up with a recollection of a novel I read 25 years ago, The world is made of glass by Morris West, in which Carl Gustav Jung is the main character. In the French translation, he was given a wrong birthday, actually same as mine, July 6.
About a year sooner I read a French study about Unica Zürn. I knew she was born on July 6, 1916, and the text said she was born on July 16. Although I wrote a text about that (in French here), I absolutely didn't think then of West's mistake.
I later found West's novel I still had in my attic, and here is the passage in its beginning:Actually it's not West's mistake, as it was not present in the original novel:It goes on with "I am married, with four children and a fifth on the way.", but I couldn't get the last words with GoogleBooks. West shows Jung in 1913, when Emma was actually pregnant of their fifth and last child. The mistake about Jung's birth came to my mind just before I had the intuition of the 4-1 pattern in his life.
Curiously enough, a friend informed me after that there was another novel in which Jung is a main character, Pilgrim by Timothy Findley (1999), and in this plot set in 1912 Findley imagined Emma was too waiting for Jung's fifth child, as he needed her to be pregnant.

When I went to sleep late on Sep 7, 2008 there were other novels on my mind. A week sooner, I discovered a novel by French writer Gilbert Sinoué, Des jours et des nuits (2001), untranslated in English (Days and nights) but there is a TV adaptation broadcasted with subtitles.
It's a story about a man in Argentina, in 1930, who dreams of a wonderful woman he was in love with, long ago in another life. They died both in a disaster. His persistent dreams make him see a Jungian analyst, who points to their mythical content. Jung is informed of the case and follows it from Swiss.
New dreams make Ricardo believe the woman is alive now, in Greece. The clues are so vivid he goes to Greece, and his search makes him find in Crete the archeologist Dora. She first doesn't listen to him, but striking coincidences lead her to accept they had both been in love long ago in Thera (Santorini), where they died in the volcanic explosion of the island, circa 1623 BC. One of this striking facts is that Ricardo knows something about the Phaistos Disc which she studies.
She accepts to follow him in Argentina, but the ship Doria that takes them there is wrecked on the way, and they both die again in a disaster.

This reminded me of some novels by locked room mystery French master, Paul Halter. Some of it has been translated, but not the three ones where he uses his other passion, Minoan civilization.
It would be too long to detail the common points, anyhow the question if I was right or wrong is secondary here, as I first try to tell what was on my mind just before Sep 8. I was a bit right actually as the two authors were quite surprised with these common points: they didn't know their respective works.
I'll stick to the last of those three Halter's, Le chemin de la lumière (2000, Path of light). Michel, a young man, flies towards Crete where he has found a job on an archeological site, that is quite new to him. During his journey he sees in a kind of dream the words 'path of light', wondering what it might mean. He thinks too of a girlfriend he had years ago, Andrée, with whom he had lost all contact.
Andrée is waiting for him at the landing of the plane in Crete. She's the wife of an archeologist, and they've found recently the 'path of light', a pottery disc looking like the kernos of Malia. She has an idea about its magic use, she experiments it, and the reader is sent 3500 years sooner when a mysterious Andrea is found on a Cretan beach...
Then there are alternate chapters about Andrea in ancient Crete and Michel looking for Andrée in modern Crete, until he tries himself the 'path of light'. It's not clear whether he succeeds in rejoining Andrea in ancient Crete, or all of this was delirium. That's the first Halter's novel with a fantastic ending.

Looking at the common points between the novels of Halter and Sinoué, I noticed the names of the two heroins living in Minoan as well as in modern times, Andrea and Dora, the last drowned in Doria's sinking. That made me think of Andrea Doria's wreck, about which I didn't know much.
I learnt it was the last transatlantic shipwreck, in 1956. When I read about it on Sep 4, 2008, what striked me the most was an anecdote about the actress Ruth Roman, who was onboard with her 4-year son:

In the 1950 film Three Secrets, Roman had portrayed a distraught mother waiting to learn whether or not her child had survived a plane crash. She and her son were separated from each other during the collision and evacuation. Rescued, Roman had to wait to learn her child's fate...

I enquired about Ruth Roman, born Norma Roman, a perfect anagram (see next post), and learnt she died on 9/9/99. I knew well this schematic date, as it was the day when I finished the only novel (French "roman") I ever published. I put it at the end, and found clever to add I began it on 6/6/66...
Since that, I had noticed Jung's 4/4/44 (on 4/4/4!), and I thought of writing something about these coincidences, emphasizing upon synchronicity and upon mandala, the round shape in which Jung saw the most prominent archetype, the symbol of the self. Most coincidences between the books deal with round objects. In Sinoué's as in Halter's, there is a mystery about a 'round island', and it is solved when thinking that before the explosion which destroyed a good part of Thera-Santorini, the island was name Strongylé, "round" in Greek.
On Sep 7, 08, I went to bed with the four novels, Sinoué's one, and the three Minoan novels by Halter. I had a look at each one of them before sleeping...

...and I woke up with the recollection of the mistake in West's novel. It was like, as said Jung about the last step in the building of Bollingen, "an old seed that germinated", from what was to him a quaternity, the three parts of the house and the loggia. And from the 4 recent novels, 3+1, germinated a seed planted in 1983 in my brain, when I read The world is made of glass.
It's only recently, while working on this English blog, that I realized how much this Andrea Doria's wreck might have been important, and how many hidden coincidences were left.

- It was in 1956, the year Jung found he had to add a room up at the center of Bollingen.

- When I first looked at the date, and maybe saw July 25, it didn't mean nothing at that time. Now I'm fully aware Jung was born on a July 26, and it was on July 25 at 23:00 NY time when Andrea Doria and Stockholm collided. It was July 26, 7:00 in Western Europe, and that was 11 hours later when Andrea Doria actually sank.
So I enquired about this event, not noticing its exact date, and I woke up a few days later with a question in my mind about Jung's birthday.

- Morris West died on Oct 9, 99, exactly a month after Ruth Roman.

- The initials A-D of Andrea Doria have ranks 1-4 in the alphabet.
This reminds me of a puzzling coincidence about 4-1 pattern in Jung's life.
On last Feb 25, a friend who is a great fan of Austrian tenor Richard Tauber sent me a picture of him beside one of his Mercedes, asking me if its number, clearly readable, meant something to me.
Sure! 25088 is 4 times 6272. Jung had lived 25088 complete days before 4/4/44 morning, and he would live 6272 complete days after.
Any relation between Tauber and Jung? Doesn't seem so, besides the fact they were two contemporary celebrities, but there is a strange thing about the seldom word in German Tauber, "male dove", which Jung heard in a dream around Christmas of 1912. He was in a loggia set high up on the tower of a castle. A dove came in, transformed into a little girl, played a while with Jung's children. She tenderly placed her arms around Jung's neck...

Then she suddenly vanished; the dove was back and spoke slowly in a human voice. "Only in the first hours of the night can I transform myself into a human being, while the male dove (Tauber) is busy with the twelve dead". Then she flew off into the blue air, and I awoke.
(MDR, Confrontation with the Unconscious)

West mentions in his novel "the dove speaking with a human voice", alluding to this dream where many 'Bollingen keywords' appear: tower, loggia, 12 (this dream about 12 dead was in 12/12, and Jung took 12 years to build Bollingen quaternity).
It has to be thought too Jung had 4 children at this time. His 5th child was not yet "on the way", a girl, Helene, born on March 18, 1914. The four previous children were born in years 04-06-08-10, with a regularity recalling the first four steps of Bollingen in 23-27-31-35. Then there is a jump, with last child in 14, and last room in 56, after Emma's death. Maybe Findley was right when imagining Emma pregnant in April 12...
I come back to the real Tauber, the man singing with a dove voice, and driving a 25088 car. Not long after my friend sent me that information, I was in the 'capital of my state' (Digne in French department 04), and I saw a van with number 6272 turning in next street. I followed it, hoping to take a picture, and it parked in a garage to inflate its tyres.
I took a picture, and then noticed it parked just above letters AD, AD as Andrea Doria, as 1-4. My picture was taken on April 1, 4/1, but in French we say "1er avril", 1/4.
This is speaking to a Jungian, as one of the first examples of synchronicity given in Jung's famous book is a case about April first, Fools' day.
AD stands for Auto-Distribution, a company which rules hundreds of garages in France. Enquiring about it, I learnt it was bought recently by the group TOWERbrook.