Mephistopheles is not your name….

Mephistopheles is not your name. “Wrapped Around Your Finger” is from The Police‘s 1983 album Synchronicity.

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrapped_Around_Your_Finger>




Inspired by Carl Jung’s theory of Synchronicity, it references the German legend of Faust (below). So did Jung, for that matter. Jung called Goethe’s Faust an “alchemical drama.” This paper (Goethe, Faust, Alchemy, and Jung) argues it’s not.

Arthur Koestler, whose book “The Roots of Coincidence” is the link between Sting and Jung, and the inspiration for The Police’s album, hoped for a death not unlike Goethe’s Homunculus’ dissolution into the sea (“with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This ‘oceanic feeling’ has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this” Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler> ).

(Jung’s Synchronicity refers to a meaningful coincidence where the two events are not related. It conjures a higher and invisible relationship. Where a sober person might agree that a coincidence is largely no more than that, a particular metaphysical chill gives even a sober person pause to reflect that perhaps there is more to it in this case.)

“Mephistopheles is not your name
But I know what you’re up to just the same
I will listen hard to your tuition
And you will see it come to it’s fruition”

Pasted from <http://www.sting.com/discography/lyrics/lyric/song/281>

Music video by The Police performing Wrapped Around Your Finger.


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