Synchronicity Cambray

hour days. In 1845 Hans Christian Andersen published “The Little
Match Girl,” in which a poor girls selling matches dies of cold on New
Year’s Eve after exhausting her supply of matches. By 1864 such abuses
brought legislation setting minimum age and number of hours of
work for children. But the fiendish side of phosphorus had not been
fully expressed until the Second World War when phosphorus bombs
were used against civilian targets. In July 1943 an attack designed to
destroy Hamburg (ironically the city of the discovery of phosphorus)
was planned, Operation Gomorrah. Bombings continued for more
than a week, in the midst of which a firestorm was set off. According
to Emsley:
At the end of that week 25 square kilometers (10 square miles) of
the city were reduced to rubble and 800,000 people were homeless.
. . . The total number of civilians killed . . . was 37,000, but 10,000
were missing, presumed dead. This can be compared with the
30,000 killed by bombs in London during the years 1940–45 but
falls far short of the 80,000 who died in an incendiary raid on
Tokyo by the USAF on the night of 9 March 1945; or the 140,000
who died when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 33
The compensatory qualities of phosphorus, the demonic light in the
darkness, more than offsets the imaginings of it as the source of all
healing, the philosopher’s stone. While positive and negative aspects
of phosphorus could be further elaborated, I will simply note that
Emsley also points out how nature seems to respond to such catastrophes
as the destruction of Hamburg in “strange” ways. In this case,
“in the autumn of 1943 the many lilac and chestnut trees of the city
suddenly came into blossom as if it were spring.” 34
The timing of the discovery of phosphorus, the involvement of
Leibniz in the story (recall he was identified by Jung as the key precursor
to the idea of synchronicity), and the historical unfolding of the
use of the element act as a “mirror” reflecting a dark genius in various
ages, pointing to the objective psyche at play through the human use
of this element. We could look at the ongoing story as a series of discrete
synchronicities, often with a dark tone, or in the language of this
Cultural Synchronicities ( 0 )