Chapter 30 #2
‘They were definitely here, then, where we are now,’ said Caitlin in excitement.
‘I saw it all: the sisters, the hill fort and even the moment when everything changed. In the past, Lear had a terrible accident. The tribe was reinforcing their security by placing sharpened sticks around the hill fort. They pointed outwards to deter raiders but Lear slipped and one sliced though his cheek and came out through the top of his head.’
‘Gross,’ said Sindy, wincing. ‘Did it kill him?’
‘No, but after he recovered, his personality had changed and this was when he forced his daughters to marry and promised to give a share of his kingdom to whichever one of them had a son first. It also explains the cause of his madness; I’d always thought it was dementia.’
‘You diagnosed an illness to a character in a play?’ said Lee in disbelief.
‘Not consciously,’ said Caitlin, ‘but when I was reading the Monmouth version, I wondered what could have caused a previously reliable and trustworthy king to have such a change of direction.’
‘Phineas Gage,’ said Lee, and Caitlin nodded.
‘Who?’ asked Sindy.
Caitlin gazed at her mother’s drawing of Cordelia, while Lee explained the American Crowbar case to Sindy.
‘This is almost too much,’ Sindy said when Lee had finished.
‘You said you’d also been dreaming about three women on a quest too,’ said Lee. ‘Were they Goneril, Regan and Cordelia?’
‘No,’ replied Caitlin, looking away from the eerily accurate drawing, her focus back on her trip to the Everywhen. ‘They’re similar but the tale feels more Arthurian, there are castles, knights, armour and a macabre jester figure who’s controlling events.’
Caitlin explained to Lee all she had told Sindy earlier about the diaries, showing them both her mother’s sketches of the three women and their world.
When she explained the story had been recorded in her mother’s notebooks too by the women of her maternal line dating back to 1687, they were stunned.
‘There isn’t enough data to check each one definitively but from the information available over two-thirds of them are the third daughter of a third daughter.’
There was an uneasy silence.
‘You heard a chant, didn’t you?’ said Sindy.
‘Yes,’ said Caitlin, turning to the first page of the notebook and reading aloud, ‘“One becomes two; two becomes three; and out of the third comes the fourth, the One. The fourth is the Charmed One who will heal the curse. The triple goddess of the bees cursed you. Three by three by three by three by three, the third daughter of the third daughter of the third daughter from the time of shadows and fear, until one shall come, a youngest child of a youngest child of a youngest child who is both third and fourth. She shall have the power to heal this curse.”’
Lee stared at her in astonishment. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.
‘Yes, why?’
‘The first line is a well-known phrase from psychology and is known as the Axiom of Maria,’ he said.
‘The what?’ asked Caitlin.
‘I need a drink,’ groaned Sindy. ‘One that’s stronger than hot chocolate.’
She walked into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of red wine and three glasses.
‘Do you mind?’ she asked Caitlin.
‘Pour away,’ Caitlin replied. ‘Why do you know about the…?’ She looked at Lee questioningly.
‘The Axiom of Maria,’ said Lee. ‘You know my original plan was to become a psychiatrist, well, I came across it while I was studying. Let me find it online because it’s quite complex and I want to make sure we know all the facts.
’ He opened his phone and after a few seconds tapping, he said, ‘Here, it says this phrase was attributed to the third-century alchemist Maria Prophetissa, who is thought to be the sister of Moses.’
‘I didn’t know Moses had a sister,’ said Sindy.
‘It’s because you never paid attention at Sunday school,’ said Lee.
‘It’s because we never went,’ replied Caitlin and they all laughed.
‘I was interested in the work of Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung,’ continued Lee, ‘and there’s an alternative version of the axiom written by Marie-Louise von Franz who worked with Jung.
’ Lee looked at his phone again. ‘Here it is, it’s a bit different,’ he said and read, ‘“Out of the One comes Two, out of the Two comes Three, and from the Third comes the One as the Fourth.” Jung used the axiom as a metaphor for the process of individuation.’
‘This is almost too much for me,’ said Sindy, ‘but I’m going to ask, what’s individuation?’
‘It’s the process where an individual becomes distinct from other things,’ Lee explained.
‘The trinity, the number three, was always proposed by philosophers and psychologists as being the perfect number but Jung believed that rather than three being the most important number for the psychological development of Western humanity, it was four. He wrote an essay called The Problem of the Fourth. In it, he mentioned the works of Plato, who agreed with this theory and suggested the number four was vital to what he referred to as the “World-Soul”.’
‘The what?’ asked Caitlin.
‘Plato believed the World-Soul comprised the Same, the Different and the Mixture. It was the word mixture that intrigued Jung, so he suggested the psyche was in fact made up of thinking, sensing, feeling and intuiting. He believed each person has a dominant function, which is supported by two auxiliary functions, while the fourth function remains inferior and is often repressed. We think, sense and feel with intention, but the skill of intuition is less trusted by humans, therefore, it becomes the fourth, the shadow function.’
Lee drained his glass of wine.
‘Jung said intuition is the most underdeveloped function?’ said Caitlin, phrasing it as a question, her mind whirring, and Lee nodded.
‘He was right. All I’ve seen and learned tonight is through intuition but even now we’re unsure whether what I experienced was real or in my imagination because we don’t trust the shadow function. ’
‘True,’ said Lee. ‘In your chant, there was also that line, “out of the third comes the fourth, the One”, which points towards a theory called Quaternity, the square, rather than three, the trinity,’ he continued and Sindy gave a small groan, squashing herself into the cushions and curling up on the sofa as though protecting herself from the verbal and mental onslaught.
Caitlin barely noticed, all her attention was focused on Lee. His words were helping her to untangle the web of stories.
‘Did he say anything else about Quaternity?’ she asked.
‘I can’t remember exactly,’ said Lee. He fiddled with his phone again. ‘Here it is, the definition of quaternity is a group of four things or people, with three males plus a female fourth or three females with a male fourth.’
Caitlin’s eyes were wide with shock. ‘Three females and a male,’ she whispered. ‘Like Lear and his daughters, like us.’
‘Even more intriguing,’ said Lee, turning his phone to show Caitlin an image of a red leather book, ‘is a chapter in Jung’s The Red Book, Liber Novus, which was an exploration of his own mental health and is entitled The Castle in the Forest.’
‘Please don’t tell me it was about three sisters,’ said Caitlin, a feeling of dread swooping through her.
‘No, it was about a traveller who stumbled across a castle in a dark forest and was given hospitality overnight by its scholarly owner. The daughter of the scholar visited Jung during the night asking for help as her father was holding her there. The Jung in the story fell in love with her. The remainder of the chapter discusses the meaning of this imagery.’
‘And what did it mean?’
‘It was about facing your own personal hell,’ said Lee.