Binarius

Description

Jeremy Naydler:

"Something in us seeks unequivocal answers. It underpins our modern sense of truth. That "something" is the Binarius. You can catch sight of it at work within you whenever you look for an unequivocal answer: a Yes or a No, and whenever you deny the validity of an intermediate between them.

By such means is our certainty guaranteed. And yet we know that this binary principle shuts us out of Paradise, as Nicholas of Cusa pointed out, because it confines us to the hard-edged world of Yes or No. For Nicholas of Cusa, the gate of Paradise "is guarded by the highest spirit of reason, and unless it is overpowered, the way will not lie open."(c) The guardian of the gate demands of the human soul that it declares its loyalty to the Binarius, and in this way the guardian ensures we are all strangers to Paradise. Indeed, the guardian of the gate of Paradise could be said to be none other than the Binarius itself. For it is precisely within the domain of the "excluded third," the *tertium non datur*, to which the Binarius seeks to bar our access, that we discover the realm of the gods and spirits, poetry, myth, and the world of the symbolic imagination. Precisely there is *the world of archetypes*, where paradox, ambivalence, and multiple levels of meaning are all vital.

If we identify the Binarius with the "highest spirit of reason," then its role is to try to keep us on the outside of Paradise. The Binarius would appear, therefore, not to be so much an archetype as an anti-archetype! And yet the role of "guardian of the gate" is in itself inescapably archetypal. Just as we encountered the paradox of the Binarius archetype being harboured within the conscious mind in the latter's default mode of functioning rationality, so too is the Binarius entangled in the paradoxical nature of the archetypal realm, in virtue of its anti-archetypal role. For it cannot escape this role of being the *archetype of the "anti-archetype"*. This seeming contradiction it terms actually enables us to see the true archetypal status of the Binarius more clearly, and through raising it to consciousness we can begin to loosen the hold it has on us."

(https://alvinchevskiy.substack.com/p/the-archetype-of-the-binarius)

Discussion

The Binarius and the Principle of Evil

Jeremy Naydler:

"Aristotle's understanding that evil always divides itself in two is not original to him. It goes back to Pythagoras (6thc BC), who regarded Twoness, in Greek, the *Dyad*) as characterising evil. In the Pythagorean tradition, the divine source is symbolised by the number One, the *Monad*. The *Monad* is God and the good. But the *Monad* is not strictly speaking a number, because it exists before plurality and difference. It represents unity rather than the number one. Multiplicity only enters the universe with the *Dyad.* That is why the *Monad* can't be opposed to evil, because it belongs to a completely different level of being.

For Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, the *Dyad* symbolises difference and otherness. It symbolises the Alien, or that which is at variance with the One. Many ancient authors viewed the *Dyad* as the principle of division and strife. It was also understood to be the principle of materiality, for the physical world is characterised by one thing being different from another. The ancient doxographer, Aetius, tells us:

"Of the principles, Pythagoras said that the *Monad* was God and the good, the true nature of the One, Mind itself; but the indefinite *Dyad* is a daimon and evil, concerned with material plurality."(f)

There is a tradition that Pythagoras spent many years in Egypt, and his teaching was regarded by the Greeks as rooted in Egyptian wisdom.(g) So we need briefly to turn back to Egypt again. In ancient Egypt, division and strife were primarily associated with the god Seth, who is often shown as a strange dog-like creature with a long nose and erect, flat-topped ears. Seth was a god who stood against the order of things. He is best known for murdering Osiris, and cutting him into pieces. In this role especially, Seth embodies the principle of division and fragmentation, and could be understood as an early manifestation of the Binarius.

Two hieroglyphs denoting Seth illustrate this principle of division (fig. 3). Both are somewhat hard to identify, but one is thought to be some kind of cutting implement, which is divided at the bottom. As a hieroglyph, it carries the meaning of "separation" or "severance." The second hieroglyph is of the long-nosed dog and is one of the standard hieroglyphs signifying Seth. Again, there is uncertainty about this hieroglyph too, as it is not any readily identifiable kind of dog. It is rather a semi-mythical creature depicted with a forked tail, which quite possibly indicates the binary nature of the god.

We will probably never know for sure whether the Pythagorean metaphysical understanding of numbers and their symbolism derived from ancient Egypt, but we can be fairly certain that it passed into the medieval world through such sources as Plato's *Timaeus*, Boethius' treatise on arithmetic, *De Institutione Arithmetica*, and Macrobius' *Commentary on the Dream of Scipio*. The Pythagorean tenor of Macrobius' teaching, for example, is evident in his understanding of the One as representing an entity in which all opposites are united, and as "the beginning and ending of all things." It is therefore not a number. For Macrobius, Two is the first number, and through it separation and division begin.(h) Two represents matter, change and corruption. As Jung explains, in his discussion of this passage in Macrobius:

"With the appearance of the number two, *another* appears alongside the one, a happening so striking that in many languages "the other" and "the second" are expressed by the same word... The "other" can have a "sinister" significance — one feels it, at least, as something opposite and alien."(i)

The ancient Egyptians felt this alien quality of the Binarius in Seth, who was always the outsider god. But, in the Middle Ages, the power of the Binarius would be felt in a different way as it took up its place within the world of scholastic learning and in the art of disputation."

(https://alvinchevskiy.substack.com/p/the-archetype-of-the-binarius)