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If anyone would like to become aware of his lack of education he could do no better than to leaf through this tremendously learned book by a distinguished German scholar (nothing to do with the Menninger Clinic, so far as I can make out). A very readable, well translated text of the revised German edition (1958), beautifully printed and with nearly 300 illustrations will make this chastening experience a pleasure—if taken in small doses.
It is essentially an archaeology and a history of numbers, but the cultural connections interwoven with ethnology contribute also to the history of language (number-words) and of thought processes. Although the author states in the preface that the area of symbolic and mystical interpretation is not even included, I shall try to show, with the help of a few very small examples, that he does, in fact, provide the material which could be exploited by analytical psychologists.
We are familiar with Jung's recognition of the archetypal significance of numbers, as shown in ‘A psychological approach to the Trinity’. Jung supports his statement that two is the first real number by quoting Roman sources (Marcobius), who, in turn, borrowed much from Pliny. ‘A hesitant first step’ after which man stopped to catch his breath: ‘the number two is a frontier in counting’ (Menninger). ‘Two is the first number because, with it, separation and multiplication begin, which alone make counting possible’ (Jung, op. cit. p. 118).
Menninger also demonstrates that this development has remained somewhat incomplete: in Arabic 1 and 2 are still adjectives (like ‘beautiful’ or ‘big’) while subsequent numbers are nouns. Abstraction of number sequences from the things counted (like fingers) has, in fact, presented great difficulties for the human mind. English, of course, retains traces of ‘twoness’, like ‘a brace of pheasants’ and ‘a couple of days’.
Using Egyptian and Chinese ideographs, Menninger demonstrates that the discovery of three marks a new conceptual sta