What is The Fourth Outlook?

A brief history of similar tetra typologies

Photo by Gowtham AGM on Unsplash

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At least a dozen typologies exist that are very similar. Here’s a concise guide to the typologies:

Pre-Historic — Ashina Shamanism:

Stomach soul Heart soul Head soul Over-seeing Soul

1900 — Frank Baum

Cowardly Lion (looking for courage) Tin Man (looking for a heart) Scarecrow (looking for brains) Dorothy (organising the characters above to work as a whole)

1907 — Aleister Crowley

Animal Clothes Feeling Clothes Idea Clothes Consciousness Clothes

1918 — George Gurdjieff’s Equipage

Instinct (Carriage) Emotion (Horse) Intellect (Driver) Will (Hidden Master)

1921 — Carl Jung

Sensation Feeling Thinking Intuition

1938 — Charles Williams’ Four Provinces

The Buttocks The Breasts The Head The Hands

1943 — Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Safety and Physiological Needs Belonging and Love Cognition and Self-esteem Self-actualisation

1959 — Clare Graves

Instinctive Self Magical, Animistic Self Power, Egocentric Self Rule, Role, Moral Self

1966 — Timothy Leary

Baby — Biosurvival Infant — Emotional Territorial Child — Time-Binding Semantic Adult — Moral Socio-Sexual

1975 — Peter Caddy

Material Possessions Emotional Connections The Mental Centre The Adult Personality

1978 — Marie-Louise von Franz

Allegoricus Tropologicus Intellecticus Anagocius

1991 — Carlos Castaneda

Patience Sweetness Cunning Ruthlessness

Let’s look at each quaternity in more detail:

Valentin Hagdaev — head shaman of Olkhon. Lake Baikal. Buryatia. Photo by Аркадий Зарубин, CC 3, Wikipedia

The earliest example I’ve come across was the beliefs of the Ashina tribe, originally based at Lake Baikal in Siberia, with their roots in early Shamanism. According to the folklorist, Deborah Cartwright, they believed that people have three main souls based in the stomach, heart and head. The fourth over-riding soul was found in their blood, linking the other three centres into a unified whole.¹

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Here’s proof that the tetra quaternity can provide much entertainment, tapping as it does, into human affairs.

I acted in The Wizard of Oz as Lion in the mid-1970s. I was a child in my village school at the time. So, it primed me to find easy correlations to Baum’s quaternity of characters.

Photo by Gowtham AGM on Unsplash

Later, in 1995, I compared Leary’s four-circuit brain model to the four main characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I wrote about it in my book The Sekhmet Hypothesis. At the time, I had little idea that so many cultures had tapped into the same quaternal typology.

The first three characters in Oz hardly need comment: notice their remarkable similarity to later typologies. But what are we to make of Dorothy? We can see her blending the other main characters into a unified whole. Or, turning to Timothy Leary’s model, she could be seen in developmental terms as a teenager, leading the other three outlooks to the adult phase of life. She runs away from home, but way too early, and so she returns home at the end.

1907 — Aleister Crowley

Staying with children’s fiction, our next guide appears in an obscure publication by Aleister Crowley called, Konx Om Pax. The book contains a fairytale called, The Wake World. It was originally written for Crowley’s daughter, Lola Zaza. It also acts as a hidden, symbolic guide to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

At one point Crowley discusses five levels of shedding that the student must take in order to make progress on the path to illumination. Crowley, referring to the inner animal:

You must take off your husband-clothes, and your baby-clothes…and your skin and your flesh, and your bones…

Later:

And then you must take off your feeling clothes and your idea clothes…After that you take off your consciousness clothes which you have always thought were your very own self, and you leap out into the cold abyss, and you can’t think how lonely it is…You’ve got nothing at all.²

Crowley’s stages of shedding describe the sacrifice of our animal instinctive nature, our feelings/emotions, our intellect and our adult sense of consciousness: our sense of ego or ‘I’.

It’s no coincidence that the visionary traveller loses their four main centres in the opposite sequence to Dorothy finding her three friends on the quest to see her wizard. The tetra typologies tend to travel (albeit roughly) in the same sequence, or retro-sequence: That’s to say, they develop in the same sequence as the infant to adult and often return retroactively in old age with increasing incapacity and illness.

The Wake World was made into an award winning opera in 2017 with music by David Hertzberg. Quite how the shedding scene is handled in the opera I have no idea, but I imagine a special effects team would be kept busy in a cinematic version, if it were ever released.

Crowley refined his ideas in The Wake World over time, finally describing four main centres, in his Book of Thoth, in 1944. It is here that he points to a correspondence between the animals of Ezekiel’s vision matching the four elements of antiquity and the four tarot suits of the Wands, Swords, Cups and Pentacles.

Ezekiel’s animal symbolism: Smith-Waite Tarot, public domain

Hence:

Earth, Pentacles, Bull (Sensation) Water, Cups, Angel (Emotions) Air, Swords, Eagle (Intellect) Fire, Wands, Lion (The Creative Principle)

Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way

I’ve listed the date for his tetra typology as 1914–1918. That is the earliest period I can find from notes taken at his lectures in which his three centres of instinct, emotion and intellect are mentioned.³ His flyer below, from lectures given in New York, gives us a pictorial guide to the emergence of his balanced quaternity:

Ezekiel’s four animals in a flyer for Gurdjieff’s Institute in 1924, Public Domain

Gurdjieff entertained the concept of The Equipage. It has our Carriage of instinct; our emotional Horse pulling it; our thinking Driver (trying to guide both), and a hidden, intuitive Master. His esoteric fourth ‘way’ was seen as a means to accessing this Master by blending and balancing the other three centres. However, later ‘The Fourth Way’ also became an umbrella term for much more, as many of you will know.

The development of his quaternity can be found in Gurdjieff’s Early Talks: 1914–1931, published in 2014. I find it fascinating how he refines his tetra model over time.

Gurdjieff also related his quaternity to the three outlooks of the Fakir (who works on the physical body), the Monk (who works on his emotional faith), and the Raja Yogi (who works on knowledge and consciousness). The fourth outlook, sometimes called ‘will’, is distinct from ‘determination’ or the mere acquisition of knowledge. Again, he attempts to bring the Fakir, Monk and Yogi into balance by blending all three to pay tribute to the whole.

My favourite metaphor of Gurdjieff is that of the elemental bread maker. While he changed the mix over time, I’ll refine it here into:

The body of flour (instinct) The movement of water (emotion) The air produced by yeast (intellect) The spirit of fire to bind it all into bread

By the 1920s Gurdjieff changed his centres to Instinct, Emotion, Thinking and, Sex. He then explored the idea of pairs of centres merging to create a unified force. Meanwhile, in the parallel world of psychology, Carl Jung was formalising a more precise (and consistent) typology based on four similar centres involving introversion and extroversion.

Carl Jung 1935: photograph by Unbekannt, from the ETH library, Public Domain

1921 — Jung’s Psychological Types

The similarities of Jung’s first three outlooks (Sensation, Feeling and Thinking) to Baum and Gurdjieff’s work are obvious. So, let’s ask ourselves what Jung meant by his fourth term, intuition. My favourite definition turns up in his Psychology and Religion: West and East, in which he says that intuition is a function of the Self: the ‘Self’ here being the totality of the psyche. (By comparison, the ego is the tiny, limited sense of ‘I’. Our ‘I’ is conscious of itself but often completely unaware of the hidden workings of the unconscious mind.)

So, when the Self grants the ego guidance by way of dream symbolism, synchronicity, or a general sense of wholeness, according to Jung, that’s intuition at work.

Jung:

You don’t make an intuition. On the contrary, it comes to you; you have a hunch…you only catch it if you’re clever, or quick enough.⁴

Jung reassigns the sense of ‘I’ to its rightful, humble place in relation to the Self (which includes the vast unconscious mind). The fourth function of intuition leads to a recognition of this link.

Jung’s intuition is similar to Gurdjieff’s hidden Master overseeing his Carriage, Horse and Driver. It also has echoes of Dorothy overseeing her three friends’ inadequacies.

But there’s a main difference between the quaternities. Jung described his second function of feeling as having nothing to do with emotions. Instead, it is the non-verbal ability of mammals to weigh up situations. This led to some criticism by later Jungians. But Jung always maintained that the function of feeling could only become emotional in an unconscious manner.

A Psychogeographical Guide to the Four Centres

The next quaternity takes us to the late 1930s and one of the Inklings, Charles Williams. In one of his long poems, Taliessen Through Logres, he describes the land in feminine terms. Williams links four provinces to four parts of the body.

Here’s the Inklings scholar Paul Fiddes describing the physical quaternity:

The ideal Empire is pictured as a body, its four provinces being the head, the breasts, the hands and the buttocks — the prophetic intellect, the milk of doctrine, the acts of creation and the foundation of the senses.⁵

The quote above is openly derived from an analysis of Williams’ poem by another Inklings scholar, Sørina Higgins.⁶

One of the Inklings’ meeting places, photo by Stefan Servos, CCAS 3

J.R.R. Tolkien wasn’t so keen on Williams’ prose, including his novels, but he had a fondness for the man, as evidenced by their brief friendship before Williams’ untimely death.

Here’s a sample from a jesting poem written by Tolkien to Williams as a gift:

…for many a ‘fen’ he wrote, and chapters bogged in tangled rhymes, and has surveyed Europa’s lands and climes, in her diving buttocks, breasts and head (to say no fouler thing), where I instead, dull-eyed, can only see a watershed…

Our Dear Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien

So, Williams’ poem explores the three main functions:

Sensation (buttocks, sitting, grounded) Emotion (breasts, close to the heart region) Intellect (head, thinking)

Williams’ fourth way uses The Hands to sculpt form to the early trinity of functions. Meanwhile, Tolkien’s jesting poem only plays with Williams’ first three functions without tackling the complexity of his quaternity.

1943 — Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow didn’t organise his scheme into a strict quaternity, but he refers to similar stages of growth. We can map them in the same sequence as the other tetra models.

Maslow’s model: image by EucalyptusTreeHugger, CC BY-SA 4.0

The developmental side of Maslow’s model likely influenced later models, such as Graves’ Emergent Theory. By ‘developmental’, I mean referring to each stage sequentially:

The Baby (instinctive needs) The Infant (emotional needs) The Child (intelligence needs) The Adult of self-actualisation.

Some people have difficulty imagining what Maslow means by ‘self-actualisation’. He describes it as the need to pursue various goals in adult life, such as parenting, and a sense of ‘self’.

(Maslow may have influenced Erik Erikson’s model of psychosocial development in 1950. Aspects of his Hierarchy of Needs turn up in his 8-stage model, but it doesn’t have the same simplicity as the tetra models covered here.)

Graves’ Emergent Cyclical Theory

Developed by Clare Graves in the late 1950s, his model eventually gave birth to Spiral Dynamics, headed by Don Beck. It was later openly adopted by Ken Wilber, who worked it into his broader model of Integral Theory.

What I like about Graves’ model is how personal psychology also has an evolving social counterpart, hence:

The Instinctive Self is the raw personal foundation that manifests as collective Subsistence The infantile Magical Self manifests as Tribal Society The child’s Egocentric Self manifests socially as Conquering Expansion The Moralistic/Role Self leads to the emergence of Nation States

The idea of humanity (as a whole) recapitulating its stages of growth from childhood was not new in Graves’ time. Marx and Engels had already played with it, as had the anthropologist Johann Bachofen. Crowley romanticised it with mythology: humanity’s supposed phases of mother Isis, father Osiris and their child Horus.

Erich Neumann also spent some time on it from a Jungian perspective.

It was later used by Timothy Leary…

Timothy Leary and Rosemary Woodruff, 1969, photo by John Malmin, CC-BY 4.0

Flower Power

In the mid-1960s, we return once again to the four functions, with the gestation of Timothy Leary’s Four Circuit Brain Model. (It eventually became an Eight Circuit Brain Model, but we’ll stick to the first four ‘circuits’ relating to the quaternity of basic human behaviour.)

According to Tim Leary’s friend and collaborator, Robert Anton Wilson, the model first appeared around 1966–1968. It was published in Leary’s ‘Seven Tongues of God’ monograph, conceived with Brian Barritt. It was then clarified in Leary’s book Neurologic in 1973.⁷ Barritt soon fell to the side, with Wilson moving in to work on it with Leary.

The fourth centre in their circuit model is the ‘socio-sexual, moral’ function. Leary and Wilson explored the outlooks as a four-stage maturing process, starting with the baby (Biosurvival), the infant (Emotional-territorial), the adaptive child (Intellect, thinking), and then ending with the budding teenager (Social-sexual) young adult. Their fourth centre emphasises morality, taboo, sex roles and the creation of a family.

By now, we can see wide variations in the fourth function in how it’s perceived:

Early versions define it as creating balance and harmony for our instincts, feelings/emotions and thinking. In contrast, Maslow, Graves and Leary tie it to the function of the parent and other adult roles.

Peter Caddy’s Guide to Self-sacrifice

Peter Caddy’s quaternity appears in a sensational biography of himself and the other founding members of The Findhorn Foundation. Paul Hawken interviewed him for his book The Magic of Findhorn.

Caddy discusses his relationship with Sheena Govan, one of the original foundation’s co-founders. He talks of how he gave up all of his material possessions. Then all of his emotional connections. They were offered to God, including his love for his mentor and muse, Sheena. Then he had to give up, ‘…everything on the mental level, the concepts, the intellect.’

Lastly, he had to give up his ego, his sense of ‘I’.⁸

In the culmination of the process, Caddy says, ‘The personality is crucified, and the darkness descends.’ His initiation takes us neatly back to the earliest quaternities mentioned above, relating to Tarot and mysticism. Peter Caddy is, of course, referring to the Near Death Experience: Psychological death followed by rebirth.

Oddly enough, my grandmother once met Sheena Govan in a hotel where Gran worked as a receptionist. The hotel is in Tobermory, Scotland. Govan came in with a group of admirers. They were part of her ‘cult’, as my Gran called them. When Govan was asked to pay for her room, she said to my Gran sweetly, ‘Oh that’s all right. God will take care of it.’

My grandmother adjusted her glasses (never a good sign) and leaned over her desk close to Govan. She lowered and deepened her Glaswegian voice, saying, ‘Listen pal, either you pay, or the polis will take care of it.’

Govan looked to her admirers for help with little success. She then dug deep into her pockets and found the money.

Marie-Louise von Franz

Marie-Louise von Franz with Dieter Baumann and José Zavala, 1985, Küsnacht. BEPJoseZavala, CC BY-SA 3.0

Von Franzen’s typology borrows openly from Jung but has an unusual trajectory. We’ve seen how different people linked the evolving stages of humanity to the popular typology. Von Franz did the same with an exegesis of Christianity in the Middle Ages.

A quaternal exegesis had been fleshed out previously by Henri de Lubac in his Exegese Medievale: Les quatre sens de l’Ecriture (1959). Von Franz added Jungian psychology to Lubac’s massive, four volume study. She was delighted to find the following correspondence:

1 — Allegoricus: theological dogma as base sensation. 2 — Tropologicus: interpretation by way of feeling and emotion. 3 — Intellecticus: the intellectual interpretation. Scripture as historical report. 4 — Anagocius: intuition of scripture to provide speculation.⁹

I have to say, her short study has too many overlaps for my liking. But it plays into this study here, as it provides further evidence of how the popular quaternity emerges spontaneously in all aspects of human behaviour.

Photo by Tom Gainor on Unsplash

Carlos Castaneda’s Four Precepts of Stalking

Strange cults come and go in all shapes and sizes. We can’t leave the topic of the four functions without turning to the so-called ‘biography’ of Castaneda. In one of his last books, he describes the four precepts of stalking:

Patience [sensation] Sweetness [emotion] Cunning [intellect] Ruthlessness [will] ¹⁰

The ‘Warrior’ has to cultivate all four moods and apply them in their daily life. They do this by stalking the problems of themselves and other people. Notice the easy comparison of the precepts of stalking to the other tetra outlooks listed above.

Castaneda clarified what he meant by ‘ruthless’: it does not mean being callous. It simply means being thorough and not plagued by self-pity or projected pity. Both attitudes, he believed, are only another aspect of self-importance.

The adult personality should waste no time in self-preening the ego if we are to mature in our fourth centre.

Conclusion

We can compare different quaternities. Most of the variation occurs within the last outlook/function. I think this is because it is the least developed in humanity.

Most of us are just grappling with an understanding of our little sense of ‘me’ (our ego being a product of our third function) and where it stands in relation to the totality of our psyche. Our ‘I’ is not the centre of our psyche, any more than the Earth is the centre of the universe.

So, that is my favourite quaternity. I prefer a model mainly derived from Jung’s typology, in which the fourth function humbles the ego into its proper place within the greater totality of the psyche, guided there by intuition.

The fourth outlook can be viewed as the ability to outgrow self-importance. But if you don’t like that model, there’s no reason why you can’t craft your working typology from a mixture of the above, or from other quaternities.

References: 1 — Deborah Cartwright, ‘Ashina the Grey She-Wolf’, in She — Primal Meetings with the Dark Goddess, written and edited by Storm Constantine and Andrew Collins, p. 62, Megalithic Books, 2018. (Alas, Deborah doesn’t state the (literary) source of her quaternity. Her article was, by necessity, kept short.) 2 — Aleister Crowley, The Drug and Other Stories, ‘The Wake World’, p. 54, Wordsworth, 2010. 3 — George Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff ‘s Early Talks — 1914–1931, p. 42, 2014. As recorded by his pupils. 4 — Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, RKP, p. 41, 1958. 5 — Paul Fiddes, ‘Charles Williams and the Problem of Evil’, C.S. Lewis and His Circle — Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society, p. 68, Oxford University Press, 2015. 6 — For Fiddes’ source, see Sørina Higgins, ‘Double Affirmation: Medievalism as Christian Apologetic in the Arthurian Poetry of Charles Williams’, Journal of Inklings Studies, pp. 73–79, 2013. 7 — Robert Anton Wilson, The Starseed Signals — A RAW Perspective on Timothy Leary, p. 217, 2020. (Originally written and left unpublished in 1974). 8 — Peter Caddy, quoted in, The Magic of Findhorn, Paul Hawken, Fontana, p. 67, 1975. 9 — Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology, pp. 45–46, Open Court, 1980. 10 — Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence, Viking, p. 68, 1991.

Thank you to Golden for publishing this article originally in The Taoist Online and indeed, for working for us contributors to the end. Alas, my free links to this publication appear to have collapsed with the folding of the online journal. The Taoist has since reincarnated itself on Substack. Meanwhile, I’m still on Medium.com. This fresh upload should hopefully resolve the broken links!