 The Symbol of the Circle Dr. M. L. von Franz has explained the circle or sphere as a symbol of the self. It expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including the relationship between man and the whole of nature. Whether the symbol of the circle appears in primitive sun worship or modern religion, in myths or dreams, in the mandalas drawn by Tibetan monks, in the ground plans of cities or in the spherical concepts of early astronomers, it always points to the single most vital aspect of life, its ultimate wholeness. An Indian creation myth relates that the God Brahma, standing on a huge thousand-fetal lotus, turned his eyes to the four points of the compass. This fourfold survey from the circle of the lotus was a kind of preliminary orientation, an indispensable taking of bearings before he began his work of creation. A similar story is told of Buddha. At the moment of his birth, a lotus flower rose from the earth, and he stepped into it to gaze into the ten directions of space. The lotus in this case was eight-raid, and Buddha also gazed upward and downward, making ten directions. This symbolic gesture of survey was the most concise method of showing that from the moment of his birth, the Buddha was a unique personality, predestined to receive illumination. His personality and his further existence were given the imprint of wholeness. The spatial orientation performed by Brahma and Buddha may be regarded as symbolic of the human need for psychic orientation. The four functions of consciousness, described by Dr. Jung in part one, thought, feeling, intuition and sensation, equip man to deal with the impressions of the world he receives from within and without. It is by means of these functions that he comprehends and assimilates his experience. It is by means of them that he can respond. Brahma's fourfold survey of the universe symbolizes the necessary integration of these four functions that man must achieve. In art, the circle is often eight-raid. This expresses a reciprocal overlapping of the four functions of consciousness, so that four further intermediate functions come about, for instance, thought colored by feeling or intuition, or feeling tending toward sensation. In the visual art of India and the Far East, the four or eight-raid circle is the usual pattern of the religious images that serve as instruments of meditation. In Tibetan Lamaism, especially, richly-figured mandalas play an important part. As a rule, these mandalas represent the cosmos and its relation to divine powers, but a great many of the eastern meditation figures are purely geometrical in design. These are called yantras. Aside from the circle, a very common yantra motif is formed by two interpenetrating triangles, one point upward, the other point downward. Traditionally, this shape symbolizes the union of Shiva and Shakti, the male and female divinities, a subject that also appears in sculpture in countless variations. In terms of psychological symbolism, it expresses the union of opposites, the union of the personal temporal world of the ego with the non-personal timeless world of the non-ego. Ultimately, this union is the fulfillment and goal of all religions. It is the union of the soul with God. The two interpenetrating triangles have a symbolic meaning similar to that of the more common circular mandala. They represent the wholeness of the psyche or self, of which consciousness is just as much a part as the unconscious. In both the triangle yantras and the sculptural representations of the union of Shiva and Shakti, the emphasis lies on a tension between the opposites, hence the marked erotic and emotional character of many of them. This dynamic quality implies a process, the creation or coming into being of wholeness, while the four or eight-grade circle represents wholeness as such as an existing entity. The abstract circle also figures in Zen painting. Speaking of a picture entitled the circle by the famous Zen priest Sangai, another Zen master writes, in the Zen sect, the circle represents enlightenment. It symbolizes human perfection. Abstract mandalas also appear in European Christian art. Some of the most splendid examples are the rose windows of the cathedrals. These are representations of the self of man transposed onto the cosmic plane. A cosmic mandala in the shape of a shining white rose was revealed to Dante in a vision. We may regard as mandalas the halos of Christ and the Christian saints in religious paintings. In many cases the halo of Christ is alone divided into four, a significant allusion to his sufferings as the son of man and his death on the cross, and at the same time a symbol of his differentiated wholeness. On the walls of early Romanesque churches, abstract circular figures can sometimes be seen. They may go back to pagan originals. In non-Christian art, such circles are called sunwheels. They appear in rock engravings that date back to the Neolithic epic before the wheel was invented. As Jung has pointed out, the term sunwheel denotes only the external aspect of the figure. What really mattered at all times was the experience of an archetypal inner image, which Stone Age man rendered in his art as faithfully as he depicted bulls, gazelles, or wild horses. Many pictorial mandalas are to be found in Christian art. For example, the rather rare picture of the Virgin in the center of a circular tree, which is the god symbol of the burning bush. The most widely current mandalas in Christian art are those of Christ surrounded by the four evangelists. These go back to the ancient Egyptian representations of the god Horus and his four sons. Note, the picture of the Virgin in the center of a circular tree is the central panel of the triptique de Bruisant-Ardennes, 1476, cathédrale sans saveur, ex en Provence. End of note. In architecture, the mandala also plays an important part, but one that often passes unnoticed. It forms the ground plan of both secular and sacred buildings in nearly all civilizations. It enters into classical, medieval, and even modern in town planning. A classical example appears in Plutarch's account of the foundation of Rome. According to Plutarch, Romulus sent for builders from Etruria who instructed him by sacred usages and written rules about all the ceremonies to be observed, in the same way as in the mysteries. First they dug a round pit, where the cometsium or court of assembly now stands, and into this pit they threw symbolic offerings of the fruits of the earth. Then each man took a small piece of earth of the land from which he came, and these were all thrown into the pit together. The pit was given the name of Mundus, which also meant the cosmos. Around it, Romulus drew the boundary of the city in a circle with a plow drawn by a bull and a cow. Wherever a gate was planned, the plow share was taken out and the plow carried over. Note. Examples of sacred buildings with mandala ground plans, Borobudur, Java, the Taj Mahal, the Omar Mosque in Jerusalem. Secular buildings, Castel del Monte, built by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, 1194 to 1250 in Apulia. End of note. The city founded in this solemn ceremony was circular in shape. Yet the old and famous description of Rome is Urps quadrata, the square city. According to one theory that attempts to reconcile this contradiction, the word quadrata must be understood to mean quadripartite, that is, the circular city was divided into four parts by two main arteries running from north to south and west to east. The point of intersection coincided with the Mundus mentioned by Plutarch. According to another theory, the contradiction can be understood only as a symbol, namely as a visual representation of the mathematically insoluble problem of the squaring of the circle, which had greatly preoccupied the Greeks and was to play so great a part in alchemy. Strangely enough, before describing the circle ceremony of the foundation of the city by Romulus, Plutarch also speaks of Rome as Roma quadrata, a square city. For him, Rome was both a circle and a square. In each theory, a true Mandela is involved, and that links up with Plutarch's statement that the foundation of the city was taught by the Etruscans as in the mysteries, as a secret right. It was more than a mere outward form. By its Mandela ground plan, the city with its inhabitants is exalted above the purely secular realm. This is further emphasized by the fact that the city has a center, the Mundus, which established the city's relationship to the other realm, the abode of the ancestral spirits. The Mundus was covered by a great stone called the Soul Stone. On certain days, the stone was removed, and then it was said the spirits of the dead rose from the shaft. A number of medieval cities were founded on the ground plan of a Mandela and were surrounded by an approximately circular wall. In such a city as in Rome, two main arteries divided it into quarters and led to the four gates. The church or cathedral stood at the point of intersection of these arteries. The inspiration of the medieval city with its quarters was the heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation, which had a square ground plan and walls with three times four gates. But Jerusalem had no temple at its center, for God's immediate presence was the center of it. The Mandela ground plan for a city is by no means outmoded. A modern example is the city of Washington, D.C. Whether in classical or in primitive foundations, the Mandela 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, and this transformation accorded with the vital feelings and needs of religious man. Every building, sacred or secular, that has a Mandela ground plan is the projection of an archetypal image from within the human unconscious on to the outer world. The city, the fortress, and the temple become symbols of psychic wholeness, and in this way exercises specific influence on the human being who enters or lives in the place. It need hardly be emphasized that even in architecture the projection of the psychic content was a purely unconscious process. Such things cannot be thought up, Dr. Jung has written, but must grow again from the forgotten depths if they are to express the deepest insights of consciousness and the loftiest intuitions of the spirit, thus amalgamating the uniqueness of present-day consciousness with the age-old past of humanity. The central symbol of Christian art is not the Mandela, but the cross or crucifix. Up to Carolingian times, the equilateral or Greek cross was the usual form, and therefore the Mandela was indirectly implied. But in the course of time, the center moved upward until the cross took on the Latin form, with the stake and the cross beam that is customary today. This development is important because it corresponds to the inward development of Christianity up to the High Middle Ages. In simple terms, it symbolized the tendency to remove the center of man and his faith from the earth and to elevate it into the spiritual sphere. This tendency sprang from the desire to put into action Christ saying, my kingdom is not of this world. Earthly life, the world and the body, were therefore forces that had to be overcome. Medieval man's hopes were thus directed to the beyond, for it was only from paradise that the promise of fulfillment beckoned. This endeavor reached its climax in the Middle Ages and in medieval mysticism. The hopes of the beyond found expression not only in the raising of the center of the cross, it can also be seen in the increasing height of the Gothic cathedrals which seemed to set the laws of gravity at defiance. Their cruciform ground plan is that of the elongated Latin cross, though the baptistries with the font in the center have a true Mandela ground plan. With the dawning of the Renaissance, a revolutionary change began to occur in man's conception of the world. The upward movement, which reached its climax in the late Middle Ages, went into reverse. Man turned back to the earth. He rediscovered the beauties of nature and the body, made the first circumnavigation of the globe, and proved the world to be a sphere. The laws of mechanics and causality became the foundations of science. The world of religious feeling, of the irrational and of mysticism which had played so great a part in medieval times, was more and more submerged by the triumphs of logical thought. Similarly, art became more realistic and sensuous. It broke away from the religious subjects of the Middle Ages and embraced the whole visible world. It was overwhelmed by the manifoldness of the earth, by its splendor and horror, and became what Gothic art had been before it, a true symbol of the spirit of the age. Thus it can hardly be regarded as accidental, but a change also came over ecclesiastical building. In contrast to the soaring Gothic cathedrals, there were more circular ground plans. The circle replaced the Latin cross. This change in form, however, and this is the important point for the history of symbolism, must be attributed to aesthetic and not to religious causes. That is the only possible explanation for the fact that the center of these round churches, the truly holy place, is empty and that the altar stands in a recess in a wall away from the center. For that reason, the plan cannot be described as a true mandala. An important exception is St. Peter's in Rome, which was built to the plans of Bramante and Nicolangelo. Here the altar stands in the center. One is tempted, however, to attribute this exception to the genius of the architects, for great genius is always both of and beyond its time. In spite of the far-reaching changes in art, philosophy, and science brought about by the Renaissance, the central symbol of Christianity remained unchanged. Christ was still represented on the Latin cross as he is today. That meant that the center of religious man remained anchored on a higher, more spiritual plane than that of earthly man who had turned back to nature. Thus a rift arose between man's traditional Christianity and his rational or intellectual mind. Since that time, these two sides of modern man have never been brought together. In the course of the centuries, with man's growing insight into nature and its laws, this division has gradually grown wider, and it still splits the psyche of the Western Christian in the 20th century. Of course, the brief historical summary given here has been oversimplified. Moreover, it omits the secret religious movements within Christianity that took account in their beliefs of what was usually ignored by most Christians, the question of evil, the thonic or earthly spirit. Such movements were always in a minority, and seldom had any very visible influence, but in their way they fulfilled the important role of a contrapuntal accompaniment to Christian spirituality. Among the many sects and movements that arose about AD 1000, the alchemists played a very important part. They exalted the mysteries of matter and set them alongside those of the heavenly spirit of Christianity. What they sought was a wholeness of man encompassing mind and body, and they invented a thousand names and symbols for it. One of their central symbols was the quadratura circuli, the squaring of the circle, which is no more than the true mandala. The alchemists not only recorded their work in their writings, they created a wealth of pictures of their dreams and visions, symbolic pictures that are still as profound as they are baffling. They were inspired by the dark side of nature, evil, the dream, the spirit of earth. The mode of expression was always fabulous, dreamlike, and unreal in both word and picture. The great 15th century Flemish painter, Hieronymus Bosch, may be regarded as the most important representative of this kind of imaginative art. But at the same time, more typical Renaissance painters, working in the full light of day, so to speak, were producing the most splendid works of sensuous art. Their fascination with earth and nature went so deep that it practically determined the development of visual art for the next five centuries. The last great representatives of sensuous art, the art of the passing moment, of light and air, were the 19th century Impressionists. We may here discriminate between two radically different modes of artistic representation. Many attempts have been made to define their characteristics. Recently, Herbert Tune, whose work on the cave paintings I have already mentioned, has tried to draw a distinction between what he calls the imaginative and the sensory style. The sensory style generally depicts a direct reproduction of nature or of the picture subject. The imaginative, on the other hand, presents a fantasy or experience of the artist in an unrealistic even dreamlike and sometimes abstract manner. Kin's two conceptions seem so simple and so clear that I am glad to make use of them. The first beginnings of imaginative art go back very far in history. In the Mediterranean basin, its efflorescent states from the third millennium BC. It has only recently been realized that these ancient works of art are not the results of incompetence or ignorance. They are modes of expression of a perfectly definite religious and spiritual emotion. And they have a special appeal today for during the last half century, art has been passing once more through a phase that can be described by the term imaginative. Today, the geometrical or abstract symbol of the circle has again come to play a considerable role in painting. But with few exceptions, the traditional mode of representation has undergone a characteristic transformation that corresponds to the dilemma of modern man's existence. The circle is no longer a single meaningful figure that embraces a whole world and dominates the picture. Sometimes the artist has taken it out of its dominant position, replacing it by a loosely organized group of circles. Sometimes the plane of the circle is asymmetrical. An example of the asymmetrical circular plane may be seen in the famous sun disks of the French painter Robert de Donnet. A painting by the modern English painter, Ciri Richards, now in Dr. Jung's collection, contains an entirely asymmetrical circular plane. While far to the left, there appears a very much smaller and empty circle. In the French painter Henri Matisse's still life with vase of nasturtiums, the focus of vision is a green sphere on a slanting black beam, which seems to gather into itself the manifold circles of the nasturtium leaves. The sphere overlaps a rectangular figure, the top left hand corner of which is folded over. Given the artistic perfection of the painting, it is easy to forget that in the past these two abstract figures, the circle and the square, would have been united and would have expressed a world of thoughts and feelings. But anyone who does remember and raises the question of meaning will find food for thought. The two figures that from the beginning of time have formed a whole are in this painting torn apart or incoherently related, yet both are there and are touching each other. In a picture painted by the Russian-born artist Vasily Kondinsky, there is a loose assembly of colored balls or circles that seem to be drifting like soap bubbles. They too are tenuously connected with a background of one large rectangle with two small, almost square rectangles contained in it. In another picture, which he called a few circles, a dark cloud, or is it a swooping bird, again bears a loosely arranged group of bright balls or circles. Circles often appear in unexpected connections in the mysterious compositions of the British artist Paul Nash. In the primeval solitude of his landscape event on the Downs, a ball lies in the right foreground. Though it is apparently a tennis ball, the design on its surface forms the taiki tu, the Chinese symbol of eternity. Thus it opens up a new dimension in the loneliness of the landscape. Something similar happens in Nash's landscape from a dream. Balls are rolling out of sight in an infinitely wide mirrored landscape with a huge sun visible on the horizon. Another ball lies in the foreground, in front of the roughly square mirror. In his drawing Limits of Understanding, the Swiss artist Paul Clay places the simple figure of a sphere or a circle above a complex structure of ladders and lines. Dr. Jung has pointed out that a true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt. That is the purpose of Clay's simple figure at the limits of understanding. It is important to note that the square or groups of rectangles and squares or rectangles and rhomboids have appeared in modern art just as often as the circle. The master of harmonious, indeed musical, compositions with squares is the Dutch-born artist Piet Mondrian. As a rule, there is no actual center in any of his pictures, yet they form an ordered whole in their own strict, almost ascetic fashion. Still more common are paintings by other artists with irregular quaternary compositions or numerous rectangles combined in more or less loose groups. The circle is a symbol of the psyche. Even Plato described the psyche as a sphere. The square, and often the rectangle, is a symbol of earthbound matter, of the body and reality. In most modern art, the connection between these two primary forms is either non-existent or loose and casual. Their separation is another symbolic expression of the psychic state of 20th century man. His soul has lost its roots and he is threatened by dissociation. Even in the world situation of today, as Dr. Jung pointed out in his opening chapter, this split has become evident. The western and eastern halves of the earth are separated by an iron curtain. But the frequency with which the square and the circle appear must not be overlooked. There seems to be an uninterrupted psychic urge to bring into consciousness the basic factors of life that they symbolize. Also, in certain abstract pictures of our time, which merely represent a colored structure or a kind of primal matter, these forms occasionally appear as if they were germs of new growth. The symbol of the circle has played a curious part in a very different phenomenon of the life of our day and occasionally still does so. In the last years of the Second World War, there arose the visionary rumor of round flying bodies that became known as flying saucers or UFOs, unidentified flying objects. Jung has explained the UFOs as a projection of a psychic content of wholeness that has at all times been symbolized by the circle. In other words, this visionary rumor, as can also be seen in many dreams of our time, is an attempt by the unconscious collective psyche to heal the split in our apocalyptic age by means of the symbol of the circle.