The term ‘coincidence’ covers a wide range of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a total solar eclipse, the disk of the Moon and the disk of the Sun by sheer chance appear to have precisely the same diameter) to the personal and parochial (my granddaughter has the same birthday as my late wife). On the human, experiential, scale, a broad distinction can be drawn between serendipity – timely, but unplanned, discoveries or development of events – and what the 20th-century Lamarckian biologist and coincidence collector Paul Kammerer called seriality, which he defined as ‘a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things or events … in time and space’.
The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. On first hearing he’d been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London – an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US edition.
Hollywood provides another choice example of seriality. L Frank Baum was a prolific children’s author, best-known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). He didn’t live to see his novel turned into the iconic musical fantasy film, yet he reputedly had a remarkable coincidental connection with the movie. The actor Frank Morgan played five roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939), including the eponymous Wizard. He makes his first appearance in the sepia-toned opening sequences as Professor Marvel, a travelling fortune-teller. Movie lore says that, when it came to screen testing, the coat he was wearing was considered too pristine for an itinerant magician. So the wardrobe department was sent on a thrift-shop mission to find something more suitable, and returned with a whole closetful of possibilities. The one they settled on, a Prince Albert frock coat with worn velvet collars, was a perfect fit for the actor. Only later was it apparently discovered that, sewn into the jacket was a label bearing the inscription: ‘Made by Hermann Bros, expressly for L Frank Baum’. Baum had died some 20 years before the film was released but the coat’s provenance was allegedly authenticated by his widow, Maud, who accepted it as a gift when the film was completed. (...)
If we picture a continuum of coincidences from the trivial to the extraordinary, both the Hopkins and the Baum examples would surely be located towards the strange and unusual end. My ‘broken arms’ coincidence tends towards the trivial. Other, still more mundane examples are commonplace. You get chatting to a stranger on a train and discover you have an acquaintance in common. You’re thinking of someone and, in the next breath they call you. You read an unusual word in a magazine and, simultaneously, someone on the radio utters the same word. Such occurrences might elicit a wry smile, but the weirder ones can induce a strong sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily seems full of strange connections and forces. (...)
Kammerer’s book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or ‘The Law of Seriality’, contains 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies in terms of typology, morphology, power and so on, with, as Koestler puts it, ‘the meticulousness of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy’. The second half of the book is devoted to theory. Kammerer’s big idea is that, alongside causality, there is an acausal principle at work in the Universe, somewhat analogous to gravity but, whereas gravity acts universally on mass, this universal acausal force, as Koestler puts it, ‘acts selectively on form and function to bring similar configurations together in space and time; it correlates by affinity.’ Kammerer sums things up as follows: ‘We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.’ This seems far-fetched but Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer seriously, describing his book as ‘original and by no means absurd’.
The theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, proposed by Jung follows a similar line. It took shape over several decades through a confluence of ideas streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical thinking that bubbled in the depths of Jung’s own prodigiously creative and, at times, near-psychotic mind. Certain coincidences, he suggests, are not merely a random coming-together of unrelated events, nor are the events causally linked. They are connected acausally by virtue of their meaning. Synchronicity was the ‘acausal connecting principle’.
According to the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung considered this to be one of the best ideas he ever had, and cites Einstein as an influence. In the early years of the 20th century, Einstein was on several occasions a dinner guest at the Jung family home in Zurich, making a strong impression. Jung traces a direct link between those dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, some 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that brought the concept of synchronicity to fruition.
Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his own unconscious mind he deemed the most significant experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the physical world at its subatomic foundations. Following his mother’s suicide and a brief, unhappy marriage to a cabaret dancer who left him for a chemist (‘Had she taken with a bullfighter, I would have understood, but such an ordinary chemist…’), Pauli suffered a psychological crisis. Even as he was producing his most important work in physics (formulating the ‘Pauli exclusion principle’; postulating the existence of the neutrino), he was succumbing to bouts of heavy drinking and getting into fights.
Pauli turned for help to Jung who happened to live nearby. His therapy involved the recording of dreams, a task at which he proved himself to be remarkably adept, being able to remember complex dreams in exquisite detail. For his part, Jung saw an opportunity. Not only was Pauli an extraordinary chronicler of dreams, but he was also a willing guide to the arcane realm of subatomic physics. Meanwhile, Pauli saw synchronicity as a way of approaching some fundamental questions in quantum mechanics, not least the mystery of quantum entanglement, by which sub-atomic particles may correlate instantaneously, and acausally, at any distance. From their discussions of synchronicity emerged the Pauli-Jung conjecture, a form of double-aspect theory of mind and matter, which viewed the mental and the physical as different aspects of a deeper underlying reality.
by Paul Broks, Aeon | Read more:
Images: Ernst Haas/Getty; David Sillitoe courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd
