The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.
Empedocles
The Rotundum
Since many of the unconscious contents seem to be remnants of historical mental conditions, we need only go back a few hundred years in order to reach that conscious level which forms the parallel to our unconscious contents.
In our case we step back not quite three hundred years and find ourselves among scientists and philosophers of nature who are seriously discussing the enigma of the quadratura circuli.
This abstruse problem was in itself a psychological projection of much older and completely unconscious things.
But they knew in those days that the circle meant the Deity: “Deus est figura intellectuals, cujus centrum est ubique, circumferentia vero nusquam,” as one of these philosophers said, repeating St. Augustine.
A man as introverted and introspective as Emerson could hardly fail to touch upon the same idea and likewise quote St. Augustine.
The image of the circle—regarded as the most perfect form since Plato’s Timaeus , the prime authority of Hermetic philosophy—was also given to the most perfect substance, to the gold, to the anima mundi or anima media natura, and to the first created light.
And because the macrocosm, the Great World, was made by the creator “in forma rotunda et globosa,” the smallest part of the whole, the point, also contains this perfect nature.
As the philosopher says: “Omnium figurarum simplicissima et perfectissima primo est rotunda, quae in puncto requiescit.”
This image of the Deity, dormant and concealed in matter, was what the alchemists called the original chaos, or the earth of paradise, or the round fish in the sea, or merely the rotundum or the egg.
That round thing was in possession of the key which unlocked the closed doors of matter. As it is said in Timcieus , only the demiurge, the perfect being, was capable of dissolving the tetraktys, the embrace of the four elements, that is, the four constituents of the round world.
One of the great authorities since the thirteenth century, the Turba Philosopliorum , says that the rotundum can dissolve copper into four.
Thus the much-sought-for aurum philosophicum was round.
