Mel Gibson, me and 33
Booked a ticket online last week to see The Passion of The Christ this evening, I did. What number did the database generate for me? None other than 33. That's right, 33. I mean, it was a rather significant number in the life of Jesus, wasn't it? Whenever something like this happens, I turn to Carl Jung's famous essay On Synchronicity:
"As its etymology shows, the term has something to do with time or, to be more accurate, with a kind of simultaneity. Instead of simultaneity, we could also use the concept of a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved?Thus, for instance, someone chances to notice the number on his street-car ticket. On his arrival home he receives a telephone call during which the same number is mentioned. In the evening he buys a theatre ticket that again has the same number."
Clearly, I have started at the end of this sequence, with the "theatre ticket". The phone call mentioning "33" will come, no doubt. And how many times before 7 pm, when the movie starts, do you think the number 33 present itself? Five, at least, I reckon.
Anyway, towards the end of his essay, Jung declares: "Synchronicity is a modern differentiation of the obsolete concept of correspondence, sympathy and harmony." Obsolete? Obsolete? What would Jung say today about Dan Brown, whose thrillers are selling in their millions and whose main character is a Harvard symbologist determined to find correspondence in ancient texts and modern architecture? What Brown writes may be nonsense, but he's on to something and it has its roots in people's desire to find "correspondence, sympathy and harmony". More about that later, however.
