Plum Pudding: Synchronicity, Archetypes, and the Weirdness of Number

What a Parisian Dessert, Room 137, and the Music of the Spheres Have in Common

Numbers are weird. And fascinating.

Marie-Louise von Franz, one of my favourite thinkers, wrote a lot about numbers. She was Carl Jung’s close collaborator and was instrumental in helping him explore his late-life interest in alchemy. She translated many of these obscure texts and helped him work out what they meant. Once Jung teamed up with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli to work on the issue of synchronicity, the whole arena of quantum physics became part of her intellectual explorations as well.

Pauli’s obsession with the number 137 is a story in itself. In physics, 137 is the approximate value of the fine-structure constant—a mysterious, dimensionless number (≈1/137.036) that describes how light and matter interact. It’s woven into the laws of the universe, but no one can explain why it has the value it does. Pauli’s obsession with it continued right to the end of his life when he suddenly took ill, was hospitalized, and declared he would soon be dead because he had been placed in room 137. As he predicted, he died of pancreatic cancer in that very room ten days later.

That’s not the only unusual story related to Pauli. He seemed to have a strange effect on all things mechanical. Lab equipment would break around him. Experiments would fail for no clear reason. Once, a chandelier reportedly fell just because he walked into a room. This became known as the Pauli effect and was feared by those who knew him.

The relationship between Pauli and Jung, as well as all the weirdness that surrounded the physicist, is wonderfully explored by Arthur I. Miller in his book 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession. If you’re not up to reading the book, you can find a lecture Miller gave at CERN, where some scientists challenged him for daring to even speak of Jung. Miller has a PhD in physics himself, but the scientific academy, it seems, gets nervous around the word Jung.

Is it possible that numbers not only represent quantities but have qualities as well? Jung seemed to think so. Late in his life he became fascinated by the idea that numbers were not invented by humans but discovered. That they might be archetypes—primordial patterns, older than our conscious minds, structuring both our inner experience and the external world.

This wasn’t just something he took a passing fancy to. Jung came to believe that numbers were key to understanding the relationship between psyche and matter. It was at this point that he resorted to the brilliance of Marie-Louise von Franz, as he felt himself to be too old to take on the task. She took it further than he had imagined, arguing that numbers had their own psychic properties.

For her, numbers were not just sterile abstractions—they were alive. They shaped how we think, how we feel, and how reality arranges itself around us.

In this regard, she held ideas that were also held by the Pythagoreans. To them, numbers were magical entry points into a larger reality. They were the first to speak of the music of the spheres—the idea that the planets moved according to perfect mathematical ratios, creating a silent cosmic symphony.

These traditions—Pythagorean mysticism and Jungian depth psychology—meet in a shared belief: that numbers are the bridge between the inner and outer worlds. That a secret symmetry links our thoughts and emotions to patterns in the physical world.

One is the archetype of unity. With two you have duality—conflict, reflection, relationship. Three gets things moving, and four stabilizes things. Each number marks a phase in the unfolding of our individual inner journey.

This idea shows up in synchronicity—the meaningful coincidences that defy statistical logic but feel deeply, personally true. Von Franz believed these moments pointed to an underlying unity—a unus mundus—where psyche and matter are not separate but reflections of the same deep order.

Jung recounts an example of a synchronicity that has always fascinated me:

A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orléans, was once given a piece of plum-pudding by a M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later he discovered another plum-pudding in a Paris restaurant, and asked if he could have a piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding was already ordered—by M. de Fortgibu. Many years afterwards M. Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum-pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating it he remarked that the only thing lacking was M. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, old man in the last stages of deterioration walked in: M. de Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and burst in on the party by mistake.
—Synchronicity, C.G. Jung

So numbers are weird, yes, and some coincidences—such as the journey of a plum pudding in Paris or finding yourself obsessed with a number and dying in a hospital room with that number on the door—are so intriguing that you can’t help but ask different questions.

This is what real magic is all about.