Mandala

he found himself creating regular, symmetrical images which he later identified as mandalas. He gradually came to realise that these images were nothing less than images of the wholeness of the personality, ‘cryptograms concerning the state of the self which were presented to me anew each day’

Clarke establishes the autobiographical origin of Jung’s mandala theory, tracing it to his own psychological crisis and the discovery that spontaneously produced symmetrical images encode the state of the Self.

Clarke, J. J., Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994thesis

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the mandala repeats in symbolic form archaic procedures which were once concrete realities… the prisoner, or the well-protected dweller in the mandala, does not seem to be a god… One might almost say that man himself, or his innermost soul, is the prisoner or the protected inhabitant of the mandala.

Jung argues that in modern mandalas the deity at the centre is replaced by the Self, making the mandala a symbol of the human soul as the immanent divine.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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The symbol of the mandala has exactly this meaning of a holy place, a temenos, to protect the centre. And it is a symbol which is one of the most important motifs in the objectivation of unconscious images. It is a means of protecting the centre of the personality f

Chodorow transmits Jung’s core definition of the mandala as temenos — a sacred enclosure whose psychological function is to protect and consolidate the centre of the personality against dissolution.

Chodorow, Joan, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997thesis

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‘Mandala’ means a circle, more especially a magic circle, and this symbol is not only to be found all through the East but also among us; mandalas are amply represented in the Middle Ages. The early Middle Ages are especially rich in Christian mandalas, and for the most part show Christ in the centre.

The Secret of the Golden Flower commentary establishes the mandala’s cross-cultural ubiquity and identifies the Christian Christ-in-glory with four evangelists as the West’s own mandala form.

Wilhelm, Richard, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931thesis

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the mandala served as a symbol to clarify the nature of the deity philosophically, or to represent the same thing in a visible form for the purpose of adoration, or, as in the East, as a yantra for yoga practices… the mandala has the status of a ‘uniting symbol.’

Jung situates the mandala historically across devotional, philosophical, and yogic uses, culminating in its characterisation as a ‘uniting symbol’ that reconciles quaternal opposites and expresses psychic completeness.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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the Navaho Indians try, by means of mandala-structured sand paintings, to bring a sick person back into harmony with himself and with the cosmos… The contemplation of a mandala is meant to bring an inner peace, a feeling that life has again found its meaning and order.

Jung presents cross-cultural ethnographic evidence — Navaho sand painting, Eastern meditation — for the mandala’s therapeutic function of restoring cosmic and psychic order.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Man and His Symbols, 1964thesis

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is the mandala an archetype of the collective unconscious? Or is it, rather, a form that appears at a specific time for a specific function under specific societal-cultural conditions?… Jung seems constantly to insist that the mandala represents an archetypal pattern of psychic order, and it is this which Campbell is calling into question.

Campbell’s challenge poses the central theoretical tension in mandala studies: whether the form is a universal archetype or a historically and culturally conditioned symbol.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988thesis

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it should be that which catapults one forward into a new experience of being and self, not a trap that inhibits the movement through and out of the mandala… is the mandala something ‘eternal’ and archetypal or is it to be seen in a different light?

Noel elaborates Campbell’s critique, insisting the mandala must function as a threshold to new experience rather than a container that arrests development, thereby questioning the Jungian equation of mandala with stable psychic order.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting

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They all share the characteristics of a regular symmetrical structure, often roughly circular in shape and with north–south and east–west axes, and a centripetal tendency which forces the attention towards the centre. For Jung they had deep psychological significance and represented ‘a kind of ideogram of unconscious contents’.

Clarke describes the formal properties common to patient-produced mandalas and defines their psychological status as ideograms — visible encodings — of unconscious contents.

Clarke, J. J., Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994supporting

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overwhelmed by the ten thousand outer things, one can make them into one through the image of that mandala which one has imprinted on one’s mind through meditation… Giordano Bruno adopted a pagan Weltanschauung and postulated the construction of a quaternarian cosmic mandala.

Von Franz traces the mandala’s mnemotechnical and integrative function from Renaissance Neoplatonism through Bruno’s quaternarian cosmology, linking it to the psychological work of inner recollection and unification.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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The symbol of the mandala has exactly this meaning of a holy place, a temenos, to protect the centre… It is a means of protecting the centre of the personality from being drawn out and from being influenced from outside.

Jung reiterates the mandala’s defensive-integrative function in clinical context, describing the circumambulatio around it as the patient’s first attempt to find a centre and container for the whole psyche.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting

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The spontaneous fantasy products I discussed earlier become more profound and gradually concentrate into… abstract structures which apparently represent principles, true Gnostic archai… If the fantasies are expressed in drawings, symbols appear which are chiefly of the so-called mandala type.

In the Alchemical Studies context Jung describes how active imagination spontaneously generates mandala forms as the psyche’s symbolic representation of its own development toward a centre.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

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A frequent form is the mandala with Christ in the centre and the evangelists in the four corners… The eye is also a mandala… There is a Mexican mandala, the famous Calendar Stone, which has a face in the centre with four tower-like forms grouped about it.

Jung catalogs cross-cultural mandala variants — Christian, pre-Columbian, Norman — establishing the motif’s universality and its invariant structural signature of a centre with fourfold periphery.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting

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Miss X, in Picture 12, also put a whole collection of animals into her mandala—two snakes, two tortoises, two fishes, two lions, two pigs, a goat and a ram. Integration gathers many into one.

Jung illustrates through a patient’s mandala how the symbol enacts psychic integration, gathering the multiplicity of instinctual contents into a unified whole.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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‘A luminous flower in the center, with stars rotating about it. Around the flower, walls with eight gates. The whole conceived as a transparent window.’ This mandala was based on a dream noted on January 2, 1927.

The Red Book annotations document Jung’s own mandala production, linking a specific dream image to its painted elaboration and demonstrating the spontaneous and personal character of mandala genesis.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting

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its round shape again representing the mandala in its ‘Kingdom of God’ aspect, whereas the lower, wheel-shaped mandala is chthonic. There is a confrontation of the natural and spiritual totalities.

Jung differentiates mandala variants by their axial orientation — celestial versus chthonic — revealing the symbol’s capacity to hold the tension between natural and spiritual dimensions of the Self.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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Mandalas designed for such a mystic purpose, for a kind of inner ‘refounding’ and reorganization, may be drawn in the sand or on the floor of the temple where initiation takes place… In the Buddhist mandala there is a break-through of something older, a world-building mythology.

Kerényi and Jung situate the Buddhist mandala within an archaic world-building mythology, identifying its ground plan — circle within square — as the cosmological foundation equally of cities, shrines, and psychic space.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting

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the mandala ground plan was never dictated by considerations of aesthetics or economics. It was a transformation of the city into an ordered cosmos, a sacred place bound by its center to the other world.

Jung extends the mandala’s symbolic logic to urban planning, arguing that the quartered circular city represents the same psychic need for cosmically centred order as the individual psyche’s mandala productions.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting

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A mandala as a fortified city with wall and moat. Within, a broad moat surrounding a wall fortified with sixteen towers and with another inner moat. This moat encloses a central castle with golden roofs whose centre is a golden temple.

An alchemical mandala image — the fortified city with concentric enclosures — illustrates the archetype’s structural grammar of nested protective circles converging on a sacred centre.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting

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These mandalas are also reproduced in ‘Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower’… must seek his way to the central goal. This is what the woman herself says. It is a fair representation of the individuation process.

Jung’s correspondence confirms the direct equation between mandala symbolism and the individuation process, linking published mandala reproductions to the clinical task of finding the psychic centre.

Jung, C. G., Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975supporting

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she obviously guessed the horoscope’s affinity with the mandala, she introduced her individual sign into the painting that was meant to express her psychic self… the dualities which run through it are always inwardly balanced, so that they lose their sharpness and incompatibility.

Chodorow analyses a patient’s mandala in which horoscopic symbolism appears, demonstrating how the form achieves inner balance by symmetrically holding dualities without abolishing them.

Chodorow, Joan, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997supporting

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The centre of the mandala represents a combination of the principles of Amitabha and Amoghasiddhi… each school of meditation makes certain modifications in the general ground-plan of tradition.

Govinda details the Tibetan tantric mandala’s precise symbolic geography — petals, directions, Buddha-principles — showing how each tradition modifies a shared cosmic ground plan according to its meditative aims.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting

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Mahayoga emphasises the generation stage of meditation (utpattikrama) and the gradual visualisation of elaborate mandalas of deities.

Coleman situates mandala visualisation within Mahayoga tantric practice, identifying it as the primary meditational vehicle for the generation stage and thus grounding the symbol in specific initiatory technique.

Coleman, Graham, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics), 2005supporting

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The moon represents the essence of woman’s nature and the wheel the course of life, or the cycle of birth and death… The 4 entrances are allegorized by representatives of the 4 elements. It is one of the most remarkable examples of

Jung’s letter interprets specific symbolic elements within a patient’s mandala — moon, wheel, four elements at the gates — as an unusually complete representation of the individuation process.

Jung, C.G., Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973aside

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The coloured rays emanating from the centre have become so rarified that, in the next few pictures, they disappear altogether… The interior of the mandala now contains a quincunx of stars, the central star being silver and gold.

Jung’s detailed commentary on a serial mandala sequence tracks shifts in the symbol’s interior configuration as indices of the patient’s evolving psychological state.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959aside

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Akbar used to sit in a sort of saucer in the middle of it, while learned men from all parts of the world told him about all sorts of religions and philosophies and discussed them with him. There he tried to make an integration for himself.

Jung uses the mandala-structured audience hall of Fatehpur Sikri as a historical example of the centering principle enacted architecturally, with the ruler occupying the mandala’s sacred midpoint as a figure of conscious integration.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984aside

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