A STUDY OF MUSICAL ARCHETYPES: (I) THE SYMBOLIC OF NUMBERS (Fragment 1)         Corneliu Dan Georgescu         “Music can be only described metaphorically”         1. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Pythagoras stated in his HIEROS LOGOS the idea of   Archetype as a supreme principle of the Universe (“all things are ordered by numbers”) and the idea of  Music (Mousikē) as a measure of the universal harmony ². For Plato, the Number represents   degree of knowledge, knowledge itself ³,the essence of the Universal harmony ⁴ ; to the idea of   Archetypes he adds the idea of Form (i.e. the number reflected in geometry), then the Proportion   generally, the Analogy ⁵. The realms of Numbers and of Forms are not distinct; they are but the aspects of  the Universe governed by the laws of proportion ⁶. However, the Mediterranean cultural area was not solely  responsive to the virtues of the Number. About 5,000 years B.C., in the Far East, YI KING (or „The book of  transformations”) - which was assessed by C. G. Jung as „the most beautiful collection of archetypes”   used numbers (eight trigrams formed around the fundamental binary opposition yin/yang   combination into sixty-four hexagrams) as a basis for a unitary system including life with its complex  mobile manifestations, a “true alchemy of concepts” ⁸  .2. The idea of Number is apparently the core of the entire contemporary epistemology ⁹ ;Gottlob Frege and  Bertrand Russell gave a logical analysis of the number which underlines the history of the human effort to  understand its own method of cognition. The natural number defined by its intension, or its logical content,  its “substance”: the principle of identity ¹⁰. The number means knowledge, sensible experience (whose  symbol, sign and name it is), unmediated intuition of reality; it is not only the outcome of an operation (i.e.  the quantitative definition of the object) but also the result of thought in which the operation is only the  form assumed by thought: the direct, concrete, “vertical” relation of identity ¹¹. Together with Space, Time  and Motion, the Number may considered as a fundamental category of knowledge ¹²  .3. Carl Gustav Jung defined the number in psychological terms as being both aspect of the real and  physical realm and of the imaginary and psychic realm. Above the conscious level, the numbers are  numeration; below, they are autonomous psychical entities of quantitative relevance which manifest  themselves in orders anticipating any judgement ¹³. Among the other archetypes, the numbers hold a  peculiar position: they can be symbolically expressed through a figure (i.e. through a real, concrete,  commensurable, hierarchised element), which does not mean that their essence is thus exhausted.